The Formation of the Subject in Intimate Relationships - The Other, Joint Attention, and the Economy of Attention 【(Preliminary)Draft】

ENGLISH

Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice — Paper V

The Formation of the Subject in Intimate Relationships: The Other, Joint Attention, and the Economy of Attention

Wanhong Huang — Independent Researcher

June 2026 — Draft for discussion

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. — Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet (1942)

今夕何夕,见此良人。——《诗经·唐风·绸缪》

Abstract

This paper, the fifth in a series on the philosophy of intimacy and the theory of justice, defends a single thesis with three consequences. The thesis: the subject of an intimate relationship is not a pre-given entity that subsequently enters relation, but is formed and continuously sustained through a specific mechanism—the presence of the other and the practice of joint attention. Part One assembles the theoretical ground, organizing accounts of the relational subject not by school but by the type of constitutive mechanism each proposes: mirror mechanisms (Cooley, Mead, Winnicott, Lacan), triadic mechanisms (joint attention in developmental psychology; Davidson’s triangulation), and symbolic mechanisms (Vygotsky, Saussure, Althusser, Butler), with the enactivist correction of theory-of-mind orthodoxy. Part Two argues that the triadic mechanism is the missing middle term between mirror and symbol, offers a layered reconciliation of Lacan and Tomasello, and answers a Levinasian difficulty: in the dyad, the first third party is the shared object itself. Part Three transfers the mechanism to adult intimacy under an explicit no-overclaim discipline, proposing the reflexive triangle: the mature form of intimate joint attention takes the relation itself as its shared object. Part Four develops the consequences: a critique of the attention economy as a parasite on the triadic structure (the algorithmic feed as a pseudo-shared object); a Hohfeldian analysis showing why there can be no claim-right to attention, and what structural criterion of attentional justice should stand in its place; and a new category for the theory of justice, constitutive injustice—the systematic degradation not of a subject’s holdings or rights but of the conditions of its formation.

1. Introduction: The Question of the Intimate Subject

Who is formed in an intimate relationship? The question sounds rhetorical, and most moral and legal theory treats it as settled before theory begins. Contract doctrine presupposes parties; rights discourse presupposes holders; even the richest theories of love tend to presuppose two completed persons who then exchange affection, promises, and goods. The previous papers of this series have already strained against this presupposition. The third paper argued that a vow made in an intimate relationship cannot be unilaterally legislated, because the meaning of the vow’s central terms is held in common and must remain answerable to the beloved. The fourth paper argued that the gift in intimate life cannot be settled or cleared like a debt, because its value is produced relationally, by its position in a circulation that no single party owns. Both arguments quietly presuppose a stronger claim that neither paper defended: that the subjects of intimate life—the very ones who vow and give—are themselves relationally constituted. This paper defends that claim, names the mechanism, and traces its consequences for ethics, for the structure of rights, and for the theory of justice.

The thesis is this:

Proposition 1 (Mechanism Thesis). The subject of intimate life is formed and continuously sustained through the presence of the other and the practice of joint attention: the recursive, mutually open structure in which each party attends to a shared object and to the other’s attending. The other and joint attention are not influences upon an already-formed subject; they are the mechanism of its formation.

Three consequences follow, and they occupy the second half of the paper. First, if joint attention is the mechanism of subject formation, then the contemporary industrial organization of attention—what is loosely called the attention economy—is not merely a nuisance of distraction. It competes with intimate life at the level of constitution, extracting precisely the material through which subjects form one another. Second, the question of what each partner owes the other in attention acquires a precise jurisprudential form: is there a claim-right to attention? The answer defended here is no, for reasons isomorphic to the third paper’s prohibition on unilateral legislation, and the positive account that replaces the claim-right is a structural criterion of attentional justice. Third, the theory of justice acquires a category it has lacked: constitutive injustice—the wrong done not to a person’s holdings, opportunities, or enumerated rights, but to the conditions under which that person becomes and remains a subject at all.

1.1 Method and the no-overclaim discipline

The series treats the intimate dyad as the minimal nontrivial substructure of the social: the model organism of relational theory. But the discipline announced in the earlier papers binds here with special force, because this paper, alone in the series so far, rests part of its case on empirical developmental psychology. Findings about infants do not transfer to adult lovers by default. Section 4 therefore argues the transfer explicitly, identifies what does not carry over (with Simmel’s analysis of the dyad as the principal source of resistance), and states the residual claim at its true strength. Where the paper coins a concept, it marks the coinage; where it relies on a contested empirical literature, it flags the contest; and where its argument is conditional, the condition is stated in the proposition itself.

A second methodological note concerns vocabulary. The framework of this series has been developed under the name relational being, and that name is shared, coincidentally, with the title of Kenneth Gergen’s 2009 book (Gergen, 2009). The overlap is more than nominal: Gergen too denies the bounded, self-contained self and relocates the origin of meaning in relational process. The differences are stated in §2.4; the present use of the term is independent of and not derived from Gergen’s, but his priority in the title is acknowledged, and the engagement is substantive rather than defensive.

2. Theories of the Relational Subject: Three Types of Constitutive Mechanism

A survey organized by school would set phenomenology beside psychoanalysis beside developmental psychology and let the reader draw the lines. This section is organized differently, by the type of mechanism each account proposes for the constitution of the subject, because the paper’s central argument turns on a structural relation among the mechanisms themselves. Three types recur across otherwise distant literatures: mirror mechanisms, in which the subject is formed in the reflecting regard of an other; triadic mechanisms, in which the subject is formed by sharing a world with an other; and symbolic mechanisms, in which the subject is formed by induction into a system of signs that precedes it. The claim to be defended in Section 3 is that the triadic type is the hinge between the other two, and that accounts which omit it cannot explain how a creature formed in mirrors comes to inhabit a language.

2.1 Mirror mechanisms: the subject formed in the regard of the other

The oldest modern statement is sociological. Cooley’s looking-glass self holds that self-feeling arises from the imagination of our appearance to the other and of the other’s judgment of that appearance (Cooley, 1902). Mead gave the idea its enduring structure: the self divides into the “I” that acts and the “me” that is the internalized attitude of others, so that self-consciousness is, constitutively, taking the perspective of the other upon oneself (Mead, 1934). In both accounts the mechanism is specular: the other functions as a surface in which a self, otherwise invisible to itself, first appears.

Psychoanalysis radicalized the figure. Lacan’s mirror stage places the formation of the I in the infant’s jubilant identification with its specular image: an anticipation of bodily unity that the infant’s actual motor incapacity belies (Lacan, 2006). Two features matter for everything that follows. First, the identification is a méconnaissance, a misrecognition: the unity the infant assumes is not yet, and in a sense never will be, its own. The subject is founded on an image it mistakes for itself, and alienation is therefore not an accident that befalls the subject but a structural moment of its formation. Second, the mirror need not be glass. Winnicott, correcting and absorbing Lacan, located the precursor of the mirror in the mother’s face: the infant looks at the mother and sees, in her expression, itself being seen (Winnicott, 1971). His earlier, more famous remark gives the ontological version: there is no such thing as an infant, meaning that wherever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, a nursing couple rather than a unit (Winnicott, 1960). The minimal subject is already a dyad.

The mirror mechanisms share a structure: they are dyadic and reflective. Two terms face one another, and constitution runs through the image of the one in the regard of the other. What the mirror accounts lack, and know they lack, is the world. Nothing in the specular relation explains how the two come to be jointly directed at anything beyond the relation; the mirror is a closed circuit. Lacan’s own solution was to break the circuit from above, by the symbolic order (§2.3). The literature surveyed next breaks it from below.

2.2 Triadic mechanisms: the subject formed by sharing a world

In 1975 Scaife and Bruner reported that infants follow the direction of an adult’s gaze, and dated the emergence of the capacity within the first year (Scaife and Bruner, 1975). The finding seeded a research program whose mature shape is the study of joint attention: not two creatures looking at the same thing, which can happen by accident, but two creatures attending to the same thing together, each registering the other’s attention, in a structure that is mutually open (Tomasello, 1995). Developmental psychology marks a transition, often called the nine-month revolution, in which the infant moves from dyadic engagement with persons (protoconversation, mutual gaze, affect exchange: what Trevarthen called primary intersubjectivity) to triadic engagement in which infant, adult, and object form a referential triangle: the infant looks where the adult looks, alternates gaze between object and adult’s eyes, points, shows, and checks back (Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). Trevarthen and Hubley named the achievement secondary intersubjectivity; Tomasello and colleagues argue it rests on a species-distinctive capacity for shared intentionality: the ability and motivation to form, with another, a “we” that attends and intends as one (Tomasello et al., 2005; Tomasello, 2014). Bruner showed that these triangles are the cradle of language: reference is learned inside formats of joint attention, the give-and-take of looking, naming, and checking, before any word is understood (Bruner, 1983). And the dyadic precursor is itself robustly interactive rather than merely specular: in the double-video experiments of Murray and Trevarthen, two-month-olds presented with a replayed (and thus non-contingent) image of their own mother became distressed and disengaged, although the perceptual stimulus was identical (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). What the infant seeks is not the sight of the mother but her live responsiveness: presence, not image.

Philosophy reached the same structure by an independent route. Davidson’s triangulation argument holds that thought with objective content, thought that can be about something and can be wrong about it, requires a triangle: two creatures interacting with each other and with a shared world, each line of the triangle indispensable for fixing what any thought is about (Davidson, 2001). The argument is transcendental rather than developmental: it does not describe how children in fact acquire objectivity but argues that nothing could count as objective thought outside the triangular structure. Its convergence with the developmental findings is therefore significant. The psychology says: this is how subjects are in fact formed. Davidson says: there is no other way they could be. Together they elevate joint attention from an empirical milestone to a candidate constitutive condition of subjectivity, which is precisely the rank the Mechanism Thesis assigns it.

The triadic mechanisms differ from the mirror mechanisms in two respects that the argument of Section 3 will exploit. First, they are world-involving: the third vertex of the triangle is not another regard but an object, and constitution runs through co-orientation toward it. Second, they are veridical where the mirror is illusory: joint attention, when achieved, is really achieved; there is no structural méconnaissance in pointing at the moon together. The tension between this veridicality and Lacan’s constitutive misrecognition is real, and §3.2 is devoted to it.

2.3 Symbolic mechanisms: the subject formed by the sign

The third family locates constitution in language and the social systems it carries. Saussure’s structural insight—that the value of a sign is purely differential, fixed by its position in a system rather than by any intrinsic bond to its object—dissolved the picture of language as a nomenclature adopted by ready-made minds (de Saussure, 1959). If meaning is systemic, the speaking subject is an effect of its position in the system, not the system’s author. Lacan translated the insight into psychoanalysis: the symbolic order, the big Other, precedes the subject, assigns it a name, a kinship position, a desire mediated by the desire of the Other; the subject that emerges is divided by the very signifiers that represent it (Lacan, 2006). Althusser supplied the political register: ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, the hail on the street (“Hey, you there!”) that one turns to answer being the elementary scene in which subjection and subjectivation coincide (Althusser, 1971). Butler radicalized the temporality of the scene: the subject is not interpellated once but must be reiterated, performatively, and the necessity of reiteration is also the possibility of subversion (Butler, 1997).

Within developmental psychology the symbolic family has a precise representative, and he is the natural bridge to the triadic findings. Vygotsky’s genetic law of cultural development states that every higher psychological function appears twice: first between people, as an interpsychological category, and only then within the child, as an intrapsychological category (Vygotsky, 1978). Inner speech is internalized dialogue; private thought is a social relation folded inward. The law is the most direct empirical formulation in the literature of the claim that the other is the mechanism, not the occasion, of subject formation, and it shows the symbolic mechanism to be developmentally downstream: what is internalized must first have been shared, and what is shared must first have been jointly attended.

2.4 Theory of mind and the enactivist correction; Gergen distinguished

One influential research program appears to compete with the account being assembled, and must be addressed rather than enlisted. The theory-of-mind paradigm, descending from Premack and Woodruff’s question about the chimpanzee (Premack and Woodruff, 1978) and consolidated by the false-belief studies (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), models social understanding as the attribution of hidden mental states to others: the child as a small theorist, inferring invisible beliefs behind observed behavior. On this picture the other is an epistemic problem for an already-constituted subject, and intersubjectivity is mind reading: third-personal, spectatorial, inferential.

The enactivist critique inverts the picture. Gallagher argues that in ordinary second-person interaction we do not infer mental states but perceive intention and emotion directly in expressive behavior, and that the theorizing stance is a late, specialized, and comparatively rare achievement (Gallagher, 2008). De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making generalizes the point: social understanding is constituted in the coordination dynamics of interaction itself; meaning is not transmitted between two closed minds but generated between them, in a process to which both contribute and which neither controls (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). Reddy’s developmental work supplies the second-person evidence: infants engage with attention directed at them months before they pass any test of attributing attention to others, suggesting that the lived, second-person relation is prior to the third-person theory of it (Reddy, 2008). For the present argument the critique is a resource, not a difficulty: it relocates the formation of social understanding exactly where the Mechanism Thesis needs it, in the interaction, and it demotes the spectatorial stance that would make the other an object of inference rather than a partner in constitution. Theory of mind remains in the account as a real but derivative competence, a tool subjects use, not the process that makes them subjects.

Finally, the nominal collision noted in the introduction. Gergen’s Relational Being argues that bounded selfhood is a damaging cultural construction and that all meaning, including the meaning of selfhood, originates in relational process (Gergen, 2009). The present framework shares the negative thesis and honors the convergence. It differs in three commitments. First, Gergen’s program is social-constructionist all the way down and is correspondingly reluctant to specify mechanisms; this series is mechanist, and the present paper’s entire purpose is to name one. Second, Gergen’s unit is the diffuse field of relational process; the present unit is the structured triangle, with determinate vertices and a determinate recursion. Third, this series binds its ontology to a theory of justice with jurisprudential ambitions (Hohfeldian analysis, criteria, the architecture of rights), where Gergen’s normative register is therapeutic and dialogic. The shared name marks a shared enemy, the self-contained self, rather than a shared theory.

2.5 The map, assembled

The three mechanism-types now stand in a suggestive arrangement. Mirror mechanisms are dyadic and pre-linguistic; symbolic mechanisms are linguistic and social at a scale far beyond the dyad; and the triadic mechanisms sit exactly between, sharing the face-to-face intimacy of the mirror and the world-directedness of the sign. Developmentally they occupy the interval between the mirror stage and language. Structurally, the shared object of the triangle is the first entity to stand outside the closed circuit of mutual regard, and the formats of joint attention are the scaffolding within which signs are first acquired. The next section argues that this arrangement is not an artifact of exposition but the architecture of subject formation itself.

3. The Thesis: The Other and Joint Attention as the Mechanism of Formation

3.1 The triadic as the missing middle term

Consider the explanatory gap each family leaves open. The mirror accounts end with a subject captivated by an image: dyadic, closed, worldless. The symbolic accounts begin with a subject already inside language: addressed, named, positioned. Between the captivated infant and the interpellated speaker lies a transition that neither family explains. How does a creature formed in mirrors come to be formable by signs? Interpellation presupposes that the hail can be recognized as addressed to me about something; the mirror relation contains no resources for aboutness at all.

The triadic mechanism is the answer, and the developmental record is unusually kind to the philosophical point. The referential triangle is the first structure in which a second person and a world co-occur: the infant attends to the object, attends to the adult’s attending, and checks the alignment. Reference, the elementary capacity presupposed by every symbolic mechanism, is assembled inside these triangles (Bruner, 1983); Davidson’s argument adds that it could not be assembled anywhere else (Davidson, 2001). Vygotsky’s law then describes the direction of travel: the interpersonal triangle is folded inward and becomes the intrapersonal structure of thought (Vygotsky, 1978).

Proposition 2 (Hinge Thesis). The triadic mechanism is the developmental and structural hinge between mirror and symbolic constitution: it opens the dyadic mirror onto a world, and it builds the scaffolding within which symbolic induction becomes possible. Accounts of relational subject formation that omit it are not merely incomplete; they are disconnected, a beginning and an end with no middle.

Two clarifications guard the thesis. First, “hinge” is not “replacement”: the claim is not that joint attention supersedes mirror or symbol, but that all three mechanisms remain operative in the formed subject, in a layered structure to be described presently. Second, the thesis is stated for human ontogeny and defended at that level; its extension to adult intimacy is a separate argument, made under separate discipline in Section 4.

For the purposes of later sections it will help to fix the structure formally, in the minimal notation the series prefers. Write Att(x, y) for “x attends to y.”

Definition 1 (Joint attention). Parties A and B are in joint attention on object O, written JA(A, B, O), iff (i) Att(A, O) and Att(B, O); (ii) Att(A, Att(B, O)) and Att(B, Att(A, O)); (iii) the structure in (i)–(ii) is mutually open: neither party’s awareness of it is hidden from the other, and each may, at any level, check and find the alignment confirmed.

Clause (iii) deliberately avoids requiring an actual infinite hierarchy of metarepresentations; what it requires is openness, the standing availability of the next check, which is how the developmental literature itself characterizes the phenomenon (Tomasello, 1995). Three features of the definition do later work. Joint attention is relational in the strict sense: no conjunction of facts about A alone and B alone entails JA(A, B, O), because clause (iii) is a fact about the between. It is non-delegable: B cannot satisfy her side by proxy, since what (ii) requires is her attending, not an attending procured by her. And it is fragile: it can fail silently, with both parties attending to O while the mutual openness has lapsed, which is why presence and its simulacra (Section 5.2) can come apart.

3.2 Reconciling Lacan and Tomasello: a layered account

The survey left a standing tension. Lacan’s mirror founds the subject on misrecognition; the joint-attention literature describes real, achieved, mutually confirmed alignment. One tradition makes alienation structural; the other makes cooperation primordial. A paper that enlisted both without comment would deserve the referee’s suspicion, so the reconciliation is made explicit.

The proposal is a layered account. The imaginary layer (mirror) and the triadic layer (joint attention) are distinct, developmentally sequenced, and never abolished by what succeeds them; the symbolic layer is built upon the triadic and reorganizes both. In the formed subject all three run concurrently. The layers are individuated by their objects and their failure modes. The imaginary layer takes as object the image of self and other, and its characteristic distortion is captation: the lure of the unified image, the projection onto the other of what completes me. The triadic layer takes as object the shared world, and its characteristic achievement is veridical co-orientation; its failure is not illusion but lapse, the silent collapse of mutual openness. The symbolic layer takes as object the position: name, role, status in the differential system; its characteristic pathology is the subject’s reduction to its position.

On this account there is no contradiction in asserting both that the lover’s gaze is shot through with imaginary projection and that the lovers’ attention to a shared world is really shared. The two claims are made about different layers, and adult intimacy is precisely the condition in which both run at maximal intensity, simultaneously. When I look at her, the imaginary layer is active: Lacan’s dictum that “you never look at me from the place from which I see you” (Lacan, 1998) names a gap that no intimacy closes, and the fantasy that it could be closed is itself the imaginary at work. But when we look together at the same moon, the triadic layer is active, and its achievement is not undone by the imaginary gap: the moon is genuinely shared even though the gaze is not symmetrical. The mature ideal this paper will defend for intimate presence (§4.3) is built exactly here: not the fantasy of full mutual transparency, which the imaginary layer forbids, but veridical co-orientation sustained in the acknowledged presence of the gap.

The layering also disciplines each literature with the other. Against an uncritical Tomasellian optimism, the imaginary layer insists that shared intentionality in adults is never innocent of projection: the “we” that intends together is also, always, a “we” each party images in his own style. Against a totalized Lacanian pessimism, the triadic layer insists that misrecognition is not the whole of relation: there are achievements of alignment that are not lures, and a theory in which nothing is ever really shared cannot explain the most ordinary scenes of human learning, the picture book, the pointed finger, the checked glance.

3.3 The first third: a Levinasian difficulty answered

Levinas poses the sharpest external challenge to any justice-theoretic treatment of the dyad. For Levinas, the face-to-face relation is ethically primary and radically asymmetrical: my responsibility for the other is infinite, non-reciprocal, and prior to any contract (Levinas, 1969). Justice, by contrast, requires comparison, measure, symmetry, and these enter, Levinas says, only with the third party, le tiers: when there are three, I must weigh one other against another, and the incomparable must be compared (Levinas, 1998). The difficulty for this series is immediate: its entire program treats the dyad as a site of justice, of rights structure, of fair and unfair. If justice begins with the third, and the dyad has no third, then either the program is confused or the dyad must contain a third after all.

The triadic analysis supplies the answer, and it is not a trick. The dyad of joint attention is never merely a dyad: its constitutive structure contains a third vertex, the shared object. The first third party is the world. This is not yet Levinas’s tiers, a third person with a face of his own, and the difference is respected: the shared object makes no claims and suffers no wrongs. But it performs the structural function Levinas assigns the third: it breaks the closed circuit of the face-to-face, institutes a common term to which both parties stand in comparable relations, and thereby makes alignment, and so misalignment, and so complaint, first possible. Whose concern the shared gaze serves, whose project the common object belongs to, whose world the two are jointly inhabiting: these are questions of justice, and they are well-formed inside the dyad because the dyad’s own formative mechanism is triangular. When, in Section 4, the relation itself becomes the shared object, the point sharpens further: the “we” under joint attention is a quasi-third with claims of its own grammar.

The reconciliation preserves what is right in Levinas, the asymmetry of the ethical, at the imaginary and ethical layers, while denying the inference that the dyad is a justice-free zone. The face exceeds measure; the triangle institutes it; intimate life is the standing coexistence of the two.

4. Transfer to Adult Intimacy: The Reflexive Triangle

4.1 What does not transfer

The joint-attention literature is a literature about infants, and the no-overclaim discipline forbids silent extrapolation. Three disanalogies are acknowledged at full strength. First, asymmetry of formation: the infant is being formed, the caregiver is formed; in adult intimacy both parties arrive already constituted, with stabilized imaginaries and full symbolic positions. Whatever formation occurs between adults is re-formation, maintenance, and gradual re-weighting, not origination. Second, the dyad’s structural peculiarity: Simmel showed that the dyad differs in kind from all larger groups, possessing no supra-individual structure that survives the exit of either member, no majority, no coalition, no delegation of the relation itself (Simmel, 1950). Claims developed for the infant-caregiver pair, which is embedded in a family and a society that outlast it, do not automatically hold for a structure whose existence is identical with the participation of exactly two. Third, the mediating role of language: adult joint attention is saturated with the symbolic in a way infant triangles are not; adults share objects under descriptions, and descriptions are contestable in ways gaze is not.

The transferred claim is therefore stated conditionally and at reduced strength:

Proposition 3 (Transfer Thesis). In adult intimacy, joint attention is not the origin of the subject but the mechanism of its ongoing maintenance and renegotiation: the process by which each partner’s self-understanding, standing, and horizon of concern are continuously re-formed in the presence of the other. The mechanism operates at lower intensity and higher mediation than in ontogeny, but it does not change in kind: Definition 1 applies unchanged, and its three features (relationality, non-delegability, fragility) carry over fully.

The defense is that the alternative is incredible. To deny the Transfer Thesis is to hold that the formed subject is finished: that nothing in the adult’s selfhood remains answerable to the quality of attention in her closest relations. Everything ordinary testifies against this: the observable expansion of a person who is, over years, genuinely seen, and the equally observable contraction of one who is not; the way long partners co-author each other’s memory, taste, and idiom; the clinical commonplace that the withdrawal of attention in a marriage is experienced not as a loss of a good but as a loss of reality. The double-video finding gives the deep reason (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985): what the human seeks in the other is live responsiveness, and there is no age at which this need is outgrown, only ages at which its frustration is better disguised.

4.2 The relation itself as shared object: the reflexive triangle

The original contribution this section offers is a thesis about the mature form of intimate joint attention. In ontogeny the triangle is (self, other, thing): the picture book, the moon. In adult intimacy a further structure becomes available, and its availability is, the paper proposes, the criterion of the relationship’s maturity:

Definition 2 (Reflexive triangle). A reflexive triangle obtains between A and B iff JA(A, B, R), where R is the relation between A and B itself: the partners jointly attend to the “we,” each attending to it and to the other’s attending, in mutual openness.

A regress worry arises immediately: R includes the parties’ attentional dispositions, so joint attention to R is attention to a structure that contains that very attention. The worry is dissolved by stratification. Let R₀ be the relation as constituted prior to a given reflexive act, and let each act of joint attention to R₀ contribute to R₁. Reflexive attention is then always attention to the relation as it stands, and its own occurrence becomes part of what stands for the next act. There is no vicious circle; there is a spiral, and the spiral is the phenomenon: relationships that attend to themselves change by that attending, which is why the practice is formative rather than merely descriptive.

The reflexive triangle is the point at which the series’ earlier results converge, and the convergence is evidence for the analysis. The vow of Paper III is, in the present vocabulary, a device for placing the relation under joint attention: it makes R an explicit object, before both parties, in mutual openness, and the third paper’s conclusion, that the vow’s terms must remain answerable to the beloved, is clause (iii) of Definition 1 in normative dress. The gift of Paper IV is likewise a joint-attention device: its meaning function was shown there to be non-factorizable across the parties, and the genetic explanation is now available: the gift means what it means only inside the triangle, as an object the relation attends to together, which is why its value cannot be settled bilaterally like a price. Anniversaries, rituals, shared tables, the deliberate review of a quarrel, the conversation that begins “what are we becoming”: all are technologies of the reflexive triangle. A relationship without them may persist, but it persists as habit; it is no longer forming its subjects, only housing them.

4.3 The presence of the other: attentional presence and the acknowledged gap

The phrase “the presence of the other” in this paper’s title can now be made precise, and distinguished from two counterfeits. Physical co-presence is not presence: two bodies in one room, each absorbed elsewhere, satisfy no clause of Definition 1. Surveillance is not presence either: one-directional monitoring satisfies clause (i) for one party while violating the mutual openness of clause (iii) entirely; the watched party’s attending is captured, not joined. Presence in the constitutive sense is attentional presence: availability for the triangle, the standing offer of clauses (i) through (iii).

Buber’s distinction between the I-Thou and I-It relations marks the same boundary from within dialogical philosophy: the Thou is not an object of experience but a partner in relation, and the I of I-Thou is a different I from the I of I-It (Buber, 1970). Husserl’s Fifth Meditation supplies the transcendental setting: the other is given originally in a paired, analogizing apperception, never as a completed object, so that the other’s interiority is constitutively beyond full presentation (Husserl, 1960). Sartre’s analysis of the look shows what one-directional regard does: under the gaze that I cannot join, I am congealed into an object, my possibilities alienated (Sartre, 1956). The phenomenological tradition thus converges on the structure the formal definition encodes: presence is mutual, or it is something else wearing presence’s clothes.

The Lacanian layer adds the final, indispensable qualification. Full transparency between lovers is not the ideal; it is the imaginary’s characteristic lure. The gaze of the other is never returnable from the place it is sent (Lacan, 1998), the other’s desire is never exhausted by my image of it, and an intimacy that promises completed mutual knowledge promises a méconnaissance. The ideal that survives the qualification is the one the layered account prepared:

Definition 3 (Presence with acknowledged gap). The other is present, in the constitutive sense, when attentional presence (the standing availability of joint attention) is sustained together with the acknowledgment that the other exceeds every image and every alignment: presence that neither withdraws before the gap nor pretends to have closed it.

This is the paper’s account of what Weil glimpsed in calling attention the rarest and purest form of generosity (Weil, 1951): rare, because it gives what cannot be delegated, stored, or feigned without detection; pure, because what it gives is not a holding but a condition, the other’s continued formation as a subject. And it is the third paper’s conclusion arrived at from the other side: to keep open the room in which she may always answer is exactly to sustain attentional presence across the acknowledged gap.

5. The Political Economy of Attention

5.1 Scarcity, capture, and the industrial organization of attention

The economic analysis of attention begins from Simon’s observation that in an information-rich world the scarce resource is not information but what information consumes: the attention of its recipients (Simon, 1971). On that scarcity an industry was built. Wu’s history traces the attention merchant’s model from the penny press to the smartphone: capture attention at scale, resell it to advertisers, and refine the techniques of capture into a discipline (Wu, 2016). Zuboff describes the data-extractive stage of the model, in which behavioral surplus is harvested to predict and shape future attention (Zuboff, 2019); Crary, its temporal ambition, the colonization of every formerly fallow hour (Crary, 2013). Stiegler gives the diagnosis its depth: the systematic industrial capture of attention is a psychopower, operating on the formation of attention itself, and since attention formation is the formation of persons, its capture is a matter of generational care, not consumer preference (Stiegler, 2010). Citton draws the ecological conclusion: attention is not only a scarce resource to allocate but a medium in which subjects and collectives live, so that its degradation is environmental, not merely distributive (Citton, 2017).

The present framework sharpens this line of critique with the constitution thesis. If Proposition 1 is right, attention is not one resource among others, downstream of the person who spends it. It is the material of the mechanism by which persons are formed and maintained. An industry that extracts attention therefore does not merely compete with intimate life for a scarce input, as television competed with conversation for evening hours. It competes at the level of constitution: what it removes from the household is the very process by which the household’s members sustain one another as subjects. Hochschild showed that capitalism could commodify the performance of feeling (Hochschild, 1983); Fraser, that capital systematically free-rides on and depletes the reproductive relations it presupposes (Fraser, 2016). The attention economy is the limit case of the tendency Fraser names: it depletes not the labor of social reproduction but its mechanism.

5.2 The parasite thesis: pseudo-shared objects

The critique can be made structurally exact, and the exactness is the point of having a formal definition. Consider what an algorithmic feed offers, measured against Definition 1.

Definition 4 (Pseudo-shared object). An object O is a pseudo-shared object for parties A and B when it solicits from each the phenomenology of shared attention while the conditions of Definition 1 fail: in particular, (a) mutuality failure: Att(A, O) and Att(B, O) hold, but neither party attends to the other’s attending, and the object itself absorbs the checking glance that clause (ii) requires; or (b) common-object failure: there is no single O at all, but personalized variants O_A, O_B, indexically private to each party, presented under the guise of a common world.

Failure (b) deserves emphasis because it is historically novel. Broadcast media produced genuinely common objects: the evening news was the same news, and a couple could form a triangle over it. The personalized feed cannot be triangulated even in principle, because there is nothing at the third vertex that both parties confront: each receives a stream optimized to that profile of capture, and the streams diverge by design. The deepest structural fact about the attention economy, on the present analysis, is not that it distracts but that it de-commonizes the world: it dissolves the class of objects over which triangles can form, while supplying in their place objects engineered to absorb, without returning, the attention that triangles are made of.

The feed also counterfeits the second vertex. It is responsive, endlessly and instantly; it adapts to my attention with a contingency more reliable than any human partner’s. But its responsiveness is the responsiveness of the replayed mother in the double-video experiment, perfected: contingent in form, absent in fact (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). There is no one whose attending I could attend to; the openness of clause (iii) has no bearer. The feed is, in the strict sense of the layered account, an industrial object lodged at the imaginary layer: a mirror that flatters and captivates, incapable of the triadic layer, and therefore incapable of forming subjects, only of holding them. Millions watching the same viral clip are not in joint attention with one another; the structure is a star, every spoke private, with capture at the hub.

Proposition 4 (Parasite Thesis). The attention economy is parasitic on the triadic mechanism of subject formation: it captures the attentional material of the triangle by simulating the triangle’s vertices (the responsive other, the common object) while satisfying none of the conditions of joint attention. Its extraction is therefore constitutive, not merely distributive: what is removed is not time or enjoyment but participation in the mechanism by which intimate subjects are formed and sustained.

The familiar tableau—two partners at one table, each in a separate feed—is on this analysis not a lapse of etiquette. It is a scene in which the household’s triadic structure has been disassembled and its components are being metabolized elsewhere: physical co-presence without attentional presence, simultaneous absorption without a common object, the form of togetherness emptied of its mechanism.

5.3 Attention as the ur-gift: value production and circulation

Paper IV analyzed the intimate gift through a value-circulation framework in which the meaning function proved non-factorizable: the meaning of a gift cannot be decomposed into contributions assignable to each party severally, because it takes its value from its position in the relation. The present analysis supplies what that result lacked, a genetic explanation. Meaning is non-factorizable because the original scene of meaning production is triadic: reference itself is assembled inside joint attention (§2.2), so anything that means does so by its position in a triangle, and a triangle is precisely a structure with no bilateral decomposition: clause (iii) of Definition 1 is a property of the between.

Attention is, moreover, not merely one more good that circulates in the gift economy; it is the ur-gift, the gift presupposed by every other. Mauss’s gifts oblige because something of the giver travels with the thing (Mauss, 1990); the present framework can say what travels: the attention congealed in the choosing, the timing, the fit—all of it legible to the recipient only inside the triangle, where the gift is jointly attended as an expression of attending. Three properties qualify attention as the limit case of the gift, and each is a clause of Definition 1 read economically. It is non-delegable (clause (ii) requires her attending; a hired proxy changes the object). It is non-storable: attention exists only in its giving, and stockpiled attention is a category error. And it is non-settleable: because its value is positional, no transfer can clear the balance, which is the fourth paper’s anti-settlement thesis at its root. Weil’s quality-quantity distinction completes the economic picture: attention in the constitutive sense is not an effortful quantity but an orientation, a “negative effort,” available only as a whole (Weil, 1951, 2002). What can be measured in minutes is screen time; what forms subjects has no unit.

This yields the framework’s verdict on its own title. An “economics of attention” is legitimate as the study of attention’s scarcity, capture, and circulation; it becomes the very pathology it studies the moment it prices what it studies. The generative-justice tradition supplies the alternative grammar: value generated in unalienated circulation, returning to its generators rather than extracted from them (Eglash, 2016). The triadic analysis gives that tradition its smallest exhibit: the intimate triangle is an unalienated attention circuit, the elementary cell of generative value, and the attention economy is its enclosure.

6. The Rights Structure of Attention

6.1 Against a claim-right to attention

If attention is constitutive, the partner deprived of it suffers a wrong of the deepest kind, and the jurisprudential reflex is to reach for a right: does A hold, against her partner B, a claim-right to attention, with its correlative duty on B to attend? Hohfeld’s table gives the question its exact form (Hohfeld, 1919), and the answer defended here is no, on three independent grounds.

The first is conceptual impossibility of performance. A claim-right’s correlative duty must be dischargeable, and what discharges it must be the thing claimed. But attention in the constitutive sense cannot be produced on demand: compelled attending delivers the posture of clause (i) while voiding clause (iii), since attention rendered under claim is monitoring oneself rendering it, and the openness of the triangle collapses into the performance of openness. What can be compelled is attention’s behavioral shell: presence in the room, the face turned, the phone down. The shell is not nothing, and §6.2 will return to it, but a right to the shell is not a right to attention, and calling it one obscures what was wanted.

The second ground is the isomorphism with Paper III’s central result. A vow, that paper argued, cannot be unilaterally legislated, because its key terms are held in common; a fortiori, one party cannot by unilateral claim fix what shall count as adequate attention from the other. A claim-right to attention would install exactly the unilateral legislature the third paper dismantled, with the claimant as sovereign over the meaning of “enough.”

The third ground is republican. Pettit’s analysis of domination, subjection to another’s power of arbitrary interference, applies symmetrically here (Pettit, 1997): a legally or morally enforceable claim on the other’s inner orientation would constitute a standing power over the very faculty by which the other is a subject, and would dominate precisely what it meant to cherish. The beloved who attends under enforceable claim is not present; she is occupied.

Proposition 5 (No-Claim Thesis). Within the Hohfeldian table, constitutive attention can be the object of no claim-right. The intimate parties hold, with respect to each other’s attention, privileges (each is at liberty to offer or seek attention) and powers (each can, by invitation, vow, or ritual, alter the normative landscape of their attending), but no claims; correlatively, each stands under no duty enforceable by the other’s unilateral demand.

6.2 Imperfect duty and the structural criterion of attentional justice

The No-Claim Thesis does not leave attention normatively naked; it relocates the normativity. Kant’s category of imperfect duty fits with unusual precision (Kant, 1996): duties of love, in his architecture, are of wide obligation, prescribing maxims and orientations rather than enumerable acts, leaving latitude in execution, and admitting of no external compulsion. The duty to attend in intimate life is of this kind: a standing orientation toward attentional presence whose particular occasions cannot be specified in advance, owed not because claimed but because one has, by the relation itself, undertaken the maintenance of its triangle.

Justice enters not at the level of acts but of structure. The criterion is built on the concept that did analogous work in Fricker’s theory: a wrong identifiable by a structural pattern rather than a culpable episode (Fricker, 2007).

Criterion 1 (Attentional injustice). An intimate relationship exhibits attentional injustice when there is a standing, asymmetric pattern in which one party’s concerns, projects, and experiences systematically fail to become objects of joint attention: not the fluctuation of busy seasons, but a structure in which what matters to one partner reliably cannot reach the triangle.

The test is structural absence over time, never a quantity of minutes; the wrong is identified by what the relation’s attentional pattern renders chronically invisible, not by an accounting of attention paid. The criterion deliberately echoes hermeneutical injustice, and the kinship is real: the partner whose concerns never reach the triangle is deprived of the relational resources to articulate, even to herself, what her experience is, since articulation is downstream of joint attention (Vygotsky’s law, run in reverse). But the wrong is not identical to Fricker’s: hers concerns the social interpretive commons; this one concerns the formative triangle of a particular relation, and it can obtain in full where no gap in collective hermeneutical resources exists. Section 7 gives the wrong its proper genus.

Two corollaries close the section. First, the behavioral shell recovers a modest enforceability: partners can legitimately bind themselves, by the powers Proposition 5 preserves, to structures that protect the triangle’s conditions—the guarded evening, the device-free table, the standing review; what is enforced is the clearing, never the attending. Second, the criterion generates third-party duties: if attentional injustice is identified structurally, then designers of attention-capturing systems are answerable for foreseeably producing, at scale, the structural absence the criterion names. The jurisprudence of that answer belongs to the companion paper on AI-mediated intimacy; the ground for it is laid here.

7. Constitutive Injustice

7.1 The category defined

The wrongs assembled in the previous two sections—the structural starvation of the triangle within a relationship, the industrial enclosure of attention from without—share a form that existing categories of injustice do not capture. Distributive injustice concerns holdings; rights violation concerns enumerated claims; Honneth’s recognition wrongs concern the withholding of due regard from a formed subject seeking confirmation (Honneth, 1995); Fricker’s epistemic injustices concern a person’s standing and resources as a knower (Fricker, 2007). The wrong in view here lies beneath all four: it touches neither what a subject has, nor what she may demand, nor how she is regarded, nor what she can know, but the conditions under which she is and remains a subject.

Definition 5 (Constitutive injustice). An arrangement is constitutively unjust toward a person when it systematically degrades her access to, or participation in, the mechanisms of subject formation and maintenance, paradigmatically the triadic mechanism of joint attention, independently of any loss of holdings, violation of enumerated rights, denial of recognition, or epistemic exclusion that may also occur.

The independence clause carries the weight, so its work is shown by separation cases. A person may be distributively well off, legally unviolated, publicly esteemed, and epistemically credited, while living inside an arrangement—a marriage of parallel feeds, a workplace engineered for capture—that starves every triangle she belongs to: constitutive injustice without the other four. Conversely, a poor and disregarded household may sustain triangles of full intensity. The category is therefore not reducible to its neighbors, though in practice it compounds them, since the subject degraded in formation is thereby weakened in claiming, knowing, and seeking recognition: constitutive injustice is upstream injustice, and its effects launder themselves through the categories downstream.

Adjacency to Honneth deserves one more sentence, since love is his first sphere of recognition and the kinship is close (Honneth, 1995). Recognition, in his grammar, is something a subject receives and can be denied; the triangle, in the present grammar, is something a subject inhabits and can be evicted from. Misrecognition insults; constitutive injustice unmakes. The two will usually travel together, but the second is the deeper stratum, and naming it separately is what allows the critique of the attention economy to be stated as a thesis about justice rather than a complaint about manners.

7.2 Scope and addressees

Constitutive injustice, so defined, has three addressees, in widening circles. Within the dyad, it grounds Criterion 1 and the imperfect duties of §6.2: partners are the first trustees of each other’s formation. At the level of design, it indicts architectures that produce pseudo-shared objects at scale (Proposition 4): the wrong done by an attention-extractive system is not adequately described as manipulation of choice or appropriation of data—vocabularies that presuppose a finished subject defending her perimeter; it is the strip-mining of the material from which subjects are made, and its proper legal register is closer to the protection of conditions (environmental, in Citton’s sense (Citton, 2017)) than to the vindication of transactions. At the level of political theory, it names what a society owes its members beyond distribution and rights: the protection of formative structures, of which the intimate triangle is the elementary case and public institutions of common attention—the shared text, the common deliberation—are the civic enlargements.

One boundary is drawn against overreach. Not every solitude, austerity, or chosen withdrawal from relation is constitutive injustice; the category requires systematic degradation of access imposed by an arrangement, not the exercise of a person’s own privileges over her attention. A theory that conscripted everyone into triangles would violate Proposition 5 at social scale. The object of justice is the standing availability of the mechanism, not its compelled use.

8. Objections and Replies

Objection 1 (Romantic technophobia). The argument repeats a perennial moral panic. Print, radio, and television were each accused of dissolving intimate life; households absorbed them and formed their triangles around them. The feed will be domesticated in turn.

Reply. The reply is in Definition 4(b), and it is structural, not nostalgic. Broadcast media were attention-hungry but common-object-producing: the same program reached every receiver, and households did in fact triangulate over it. The personalized feed is the first mass medium whose objects are indexically private by design; there is no common O for the triangle to take. The argument does not predict that domestication is impossible, and §6.2’s enforceable clearings describe its form; it claims that domestication now requires deliberately rebuilding the common object that earlier media supplied for free. The asymmetry is in the technology’s structure, not in the critic’s mood.

Objection 2 (The empirical hostage). The paper rests normative architecture on a live empirical literature. Shared intentionality, the nine-month revolution, even joint attention’s specialness are contested; if the psychology shifts, the ethics collapses.

Reply. The dependence is narrower than it appears. The normative sections require three claims: that joint attention as defined exists and is achieved (uncontested); that it is implicated in the formation and maintenance of subjects (supported convergently by the developmental record, by Vygotsky’s law, and, independently of all psychology, by Davidson’s transcendental argument (Davidson, 2001)); and that its conditions can structurally fail (Definition 4 is an analysis, not an experiment). Disputes internal to the literature, over the uniqueness of human shared intentionality or the mechanism of the nine-month transition, do not touch these. The paper holds the psychology as a load-bearing wall, but the building has a second foundation in the transcendental argument, and the two would have to fail together.

Objection 3 (Levinas redux). The shared object is a thing; Levinas’s third is a face. Substituting world for tiers domesticates the very asymmetry that makes the ethical ethical, and licenses a complacent symmetry between lovers.

Reply. The substitution was offered as structural, not ethical, and the layered account keeps the registers apart. The shared object performs the third’s structural function, instituting comparability, which is all that justice-talk within the dyad requires. The ethical asymmetry of the face is untouched: it lives at a layer the triangle neither generates nor cancels, and Definition 3 writes its trace into the ideal itself, as the acknowledged gap. The position is not that justice replaces the asymmetrical ethical, but that the dyad is large enough to contain both, because its own mechanism gives it three vertices.

Objection 4 (The accountant’s return). Criterion 1 forswears minutes but speaks of patterns over time. A pattern is detected by tracking; tracking is accounting; the framework smuggles back the settlement logic Paper IV expelled.

Reply. The criterion identifies a wrong by structural absence: a class of concerns that cannot reach the triangle. Detecting that something never appears requires no ledger of what does; one audits the silence, not the traffic. The relevant practice is itself triadic, the standing review in which the relation is placed under joint attention (§4.2) and each party may say what has become invisible. Where Paper IV’s settlement logic priced contributions to clear them, the reflexive review prices nothing and clears nothing; it restores objects to the triangle. The difference between accounting and witnessing was drawn in the fourth paper; the criterion stands on the witnessing side.

9. Conclusion

The paper has argued one thesis and traced three consequences. The thesis: the subject of intimate life is formed and sustained through the presence of the other and the practice of joint attention; the triadic mechanism is the hinge between the mirror in which the self first appears and the symbolic order in which it takes a name (Propositions 1, 2). The mechanism transfers to adult intimacy at reduced intensity but unchanged structure, and finds its mature form in the reflexive triangle, where the relation itself becomes the shared object (Proposition 3, Definition 2). The consequences: the attention economy is a parasite on the mechanism, extracting constitutive material through pseudo-shared objects (Proposition 4); the normativity of attention within the dyad takes the form not of claim-rights but of imperfect duty disciplined by a structural criterion of attentional justice (Proposition 5, Criterion 1); and the theory of justice gains an upstream category, constitutive injustice, the degradation of the conditions of subjecthood itself (Definition 5).

Within the series, the paper closes a circle that the earlier papers opened. The vow of Paper III and the gift of Paper IV are now legible as two technologies of the same structure: devices for placing the relation under joint attention, which is why neither could be unilateral and neither could be settled. What they presupposed, this paper supplies: an account of the subjects whose vows and gifts they are, formed in the triangle they keep rebuilding. The next perimeter is already visible. If subjects are formed in triangles, and machines now offer themselves as the second vertex, then the question of what an artificial interlocutor can and cannot occupy in the structure of Definition 1, clause by clause, is not futurism but the present paper’s unfinished business, and the companion work on AI-mediated intimacy is where it falls due.

The oldest description of love’s beginning in the Chinese canon is a scene of joint attention under the night sky: 今夕何夕,见此良人—what night is this, that I see this good person. Not possession, not even promise: seeing, in a night both stand inside. The argument of this paper is that the old scene is exact. To love is to keep a world in common, and to keep attending, together, across the gap that keeps the other forever more than what is seen.

Acknowledgements

This paper is the fifth in a series on the philosophy of intimacy and the theory of justice. The lovers discussed in these pages are kept deliberately anonymous, and every case is presented as a constructed one, so that the argument may stand on its structure rather than on any private history.

My deepest gratitude is owed, as in the papers before it, to the “forest girl”: pure and natural in spirit, good-hearted, resilient, and wise, carrying within her a quiet sense of mission toward the world. This paper’s thesis was learned from her before it was argued: that one becomes most fully oneself in the presence of an other who truly attends. Whatever is true in these pages was first true at a shared table, before a shared window, under a shared moon. The vow renewed in the third paper is renewed here in this paper’s own vocabulary: to remain present, to keep the world between us common, and to honor the gap by which she will always exceed what I see; that I will not fail her, to the end of our days.

愿天下有情人,目之所注皆有回应,心之所向皆得见证;同观一月,白首不相负。

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中文

亲密关系哲学与正义理论 —— 第五篇

亲密关系中主体的形成:他者、共同注意与注意力的经济

黄万宏 —— 独立研究者

2026年6月 —— 供讨论之草稿

注意是慷慨之中最稀有、最纯粹的形式。——西蒙娜·薇依,致 Joë Bousquet 的信(1942)

今夕何夕,见此良人。——《诗经·唐风·绸缪》

摘要

本文是”亲密关系哲学与正义理论”系列的第五篇,辩护一个单一的论点及其三项推论。论点:亲密关系的主体并非一个预先给定、随后才进入关系的实体,而是通过一种特定机制——他者的在场与共同注意(joint attention)的实践——被形成、并被持续维系的。第一部分铺设理论地基,把关于关系性主体的诸论述不按学派、而按各自所提出的构成机制之类型来组织:镜像机制(Cooley、Mead、Winnicott、Lacan)、三元机制(发展心理学中的共同注意;Davidson 的三角测定),以及符号机制(Vygotsky、Saussure、Althusser、Butler),并辅以行动主义(enactivist)对”心理理论”正统的纠正。第二部分论证:三元机制是镜像与符号之间那个缺失的中项,给出 Lacan 与 Tomasello 的分层式调和,并回应一个列维纳斯式的困难:在二元体中,第一个”第三方”正是那个被共享的对象本身。第三部分在一种明确的”不过度声称”的纪律之下,把该机制迁移到成人亲密关系,提出自反三角(reflexive triangle):成熟形态的亲密共同注意,把关系本身当作其被共享的对象。第四部分展开诸推论:把注意力经济批判为对三元结构的一种寄生(算法信息流作为一种伪共享对象);一项霍菲尔德式分析,表明为何不可能存在一种对注意的”主张权”(claim-right),以及应有怎样一条注意正义的结构性判准取而代之;以及为正义理论新增的一个范畴——构成性不正义(constitutive injustice),即系统性地损毁的,不是一个主体的持有物或权利,而是其形成的诸条件。

1. 引论:亲密主体的问题

谁在一段亲密关系中被形成?这个问题听起来像是反问,而大多数道德与法律理论都把它当作在理论开始之前便已了结的事。契约学说预设了缔约方;权利话语预设了权利持有者;甚至连最丰富的爱的理论也倾向于预设两个已然完成的人,他们随后交换情感、承诺与物品。本系列在先各篇已经在与这一预设较劲。第三篇论证:一段亲密关系中所立的誓言不可被单方面立法,因为其核心语词的意义是被共同持有的,且必须对所爱之人保持可问责。第四篇论证:亲密生活中的馈赠不可像债务那样被了结或清算,因为其价值是关系性地被生产出来的,由它在一种没有任何单方拥有的循环中的位置所决定。两篇论证都悄然预设了一个二者都未曾辩护的更强主张:亲密生活的诸主体——正是那些立誓与馈赠者——其本身就是关系性地被构成的。本文辩护这一主张,命名其机制,并追溯它对伦理学、对权利结构、以及对正义理论的种种推论。

论点如下:

命题 1(机制论点)。 亲密生活的主体,是通过他者的在场与共同注意的实践——那种递归的、相互敞开的结构,在其中每一方都注意于一个被共享的对象、并注意于他者的注意——而被形成、并被持续维系的。他者与共同注意不是对一个业已形成之主体的诸影响;它们就是其形成的机制。

由此有三项推论,它们占据本文的后半部分。其一,倘若共同注意是主体形成的机制,那么当代对注意力的工业化组织——人们松散地称之为注意力经济——便不只是分心带来的一种滋扰。它在构成的层面上与亲密生活相竞争,攫取的恰恰是诸主体借以相互形成对方的那种材料。其二,”每一方在注意上亏欠对方什么”这一问题获得了一种精确的法理学形式:是否存在一种对注意的主张权?此处所辩护的回答是否定的,其理由与第三篇对单方面立法之禁止同构;而取代主张权的正面论述,是一条注意正义的结构性判准。其三,正义理论获得了一个它一直缺乏的范畴:构成性不正义——所施的冤屈,不针对一个人的持有物、机会或被列举的权利,而是针对那个人得以成为、并保持为一个主体的诸条件本身。

1.1 方法与”不过度声称”的纪律

本系列把亲密二元体当作社会的最小非平凡子结构:关系理论的模式生物(model organism)。但在先各篇所宣告的纪律,在此以特殊的力度约束着我们,因为本文——迄今在本系列中独此一篇——把其论证的一部分立足于经验性的发展心理学。关于婴儿的发现并不默认地迁移到成年爱者身上。因此第4节明确地论证这一迁移,指认哪些不予承袭(并以 Simmel 对二元体的分析作为抵抗的主要来源),并以其真实的强度陈述那残余的主张。在本文铸造一个概念之处,它标明此乃新铸;在它依赖一个有争议的经验文献之处,它标明此处有争议;而在其论证是有条件的之处,该条件便陈述于命题本身之中。

第二个方法论说明关乎用词。本系列的框架是以关系性存在(relational being)之名发展起来的,而这一名称恰巧与 Kenneth Gergen 2009年著作的书名相同(Gergen, 2009)。这种重叠不止于名义:Gergen 同样否认那个有界的、自足的自我,并把意义的起源重新安置于关系过程之中。诸差异陈述于 §2.4;此处对该术语的使用独立于、且并非派生自 Gergen,但其在书名上的优先权得到承认,且本文对它的处理是实质性的、而非防御性的。

2. 关系性主体的诸理论:构成机制的三种类型

一项按学派来组织的综述,会把现象学、精神分析、发展心理学并置,再让读者自己去连线。本节的组织方式不同——按每种论述为主体之构成所提出的机制类型来组织——因为本文的核心论证系于诸机制本身之间的一种结构关系。三种类型在彼此相距甚远的诸文献中反复出现:镜像机制,主体在他者反照的目光中被形成;三元机制,主体通过与他者共享一个世界而被形成;以及符号机制,主体通过被引入一个先于它的符号系统而被形成。第3节将要辩护的主张是:三元类型是另外两者之间的枢纽,而省略了它的诸论述无法解释:一个在镜子中被形成的造物,如何竟能栖居于一门语言之中。

2.1 镜像机制:在他者的目光中被形成的主体

最古老的现代陈述是社会学的。Cooley 的”镜中我”主张:自我感起于对我们在他者面前之样貌、以及他者对该样貌之评判的想象(Cooley, 1902)。Mead 赋予这一观念以其持久的结构:自我分裂为那个行动着的”主我”(I)与那个作为他人之内化态度的”客我”(me),于是自我意识在构成上就是采取他者对自身的视角(Mead, 1934)。在两种论述中,机制都是镜像式的:他者起着一个表面的作用,一个否则对自己不可见的自我,首次在其中显现。

精神分析使这一形象激进化。Lacan 的镜像阶段把(I)的形成安置于婴儿对其镜像之欢欣认同之中:一种对身体统一性的预期,而婴儿实际上的运动无能恰恰戳穿了这一预期(Lacan, 2006)。有两个特征关乎随后的一切。其一,这一认同是一种误认(méconnaissance):婴儿所设定的那种统一性尚不是、且在某种意义上永远不会是它自己的。主体奠基于一个它误以为是自己的形象之上,因而异化并不是降临于主体的一桩意外,而是其形成的一个结构性环节。其二,镜子不必是玻璃的。Winnicott 在纠正并吸收 Lacan 时,把镜子的先驱定位于母亲的脸:婴儿望向母亲,并在她的表情中看见自己正被看见(Winnicott, 1971)。他更早、更著名的那句话给出了本体论的版本:根本没有”婴儿”这回事——意思是,凡发现一个婴儿之处,便发现了母性的照料,是一对哺乳中的母婴、而非一个单位(Winnicott, 1960)。最小的主体已然是一个二元体。

诸镜像机制共享一种结构:它们是二元的反照的。两个项彼此相向,而构成经由其一在另一者目光中的形象来运行。镜像论述所缺乏、且自知其缺乏的,是世界。镜像关系中没有任何东西能解释,二者如何竟会共同地朝向关系之外的任何事物;镜子是一个闭合的回路。Lacan 自己的解法是从上方打破这一回路,借助符号秩序(§2.3)。接下来所综述的文献则从下方打破它。

2.2 三元机制:通过共享一个世界而被形成的主体

1975年,Scaife 与 Bruner 报告:婴儿会追随成人目光的方向,并把这一能力的出现定在第一年之内(Scaife and Bruner, 1975)。这一发现孕育了一个研究纲领,其成熟形态便是对共同注意的研究:不是两个造物看着同一样东西(这可以偶然发生),而是两个造物一同注意于同一样东西,各自登记着对方的注意,处于一种相互敞开的结构之中(Tomasello, 1995)。发展心理学标记了一个常被称为”九月革命”的转变:婴儿从与人的二元式投入(原初对话、相互凝视、情感交换:Trevarthen 所谓的初级互为主体性)转向三元式投入——在其中婴儿、成人与对象构成一个指涉性的三角:婴儿望向成人所望之处,在对象与成人的双眼之间交替地凝视,并指点、出示、回看核对(Trevarthen, 1979;Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978)。Trevarthen 与 Hubley 把这一成就命名为次级互为主体性;Tomasello 及其同事则论证它建立在一种物种独有的共享意图性(shared intentionality)之能力上:与另一者一同形成一个如一体般注意与意图的”我们”之能力与动机(Tomasello et al., 2005;Tomasello, 2014)。Bruner 表明这些三角是语言的摇篮:指涉是在共同注意的诸格式之内——看、命名与核对的一来一往——被学会的,先于任何词语被理解(Bruner, 1983)。而那个二元的先驱本身就是稳健地互动的、而非仅仅镜像式的:在 Murray 与 Trevarthen 的双视频实验中,两个月大的婴儿在面对其自己母亲的回放(因而非偶联)影像时变得苦恼并脱离互动,尽管知觉刺激是完全相同的(Murray and Trevarthen, 1985)。婴儿所寻求的不是母亲的影像,而是她的鲜活回应:在场,而非影像。

哲学经由一条独立的路径抵达了同一结构。Davidson 的三角测定论证主张:具有客观内容的思想——能够关于某物、且能够关于它而出错的思想——需要一个三角:两个造物彼此互动、并与一个被共享的世界互动,三角的每一条边对于固定任一思想之所关于者都不可或缺(Davidson, 2001)。这一论证是先验的、而非发展性的:它并不描述儿童事实上如何习得客观性,而是论证:在三角结构之外,没有任何东西能够算作客观思想。因此它与发展性发现的收敛意味深长。心理学说:主体事实上就是这样被形成的。Davidson 说:它们不可能以别的方式被形成。二者合力把共同注意从一个经验性的里程碑,提升为主体性的一个候选的构成性条件——而这恰恰是机制论点所赋予它的等级。

三元机制在两个方面区别于镜像机制,而第3节的论证将利用这两点。其一,它们是涉世的(world-involving):三角的第三个顶点不是另一道目光,而是一个对象,构成经由朝向它的共同定向来运行。其二,它们在镜子虚幻之处是真确的(veridical):共同注意,一旦达成,便是真正达成的;一同指着月亮,其中没有结构性的误认。这种真确性与 Lacan 那构成性的误认之间的张力是真实的,§3.2 即专门处理它。

2.3 符号机制:被符号所形成的主体

第三个家族把构成定位于语言及其所承载的社会系统之中。Saussure 的结构主义洞见——符号的价值纯粹是差异性的,由它在系统中的位置、而非由它与其对象之间任何内在的纽带所固定——消解了”语言是被现成的心灵所采用的一套名目”这一图景(de Saussure, 1959)。倘若意义是系统性的,那么言说的主体便是它在系统中之位置的一个效果,而非系统的作者。Lacan 把这一洞见译入精神分析:符号秩序、大他者,先于主体,给它指派一个名字、一个亲属位置、一种被大他者之欲望所中介的欲望;浮现出来的主体被那些恰恰代表着它的能指所分裂(Lacan, 2006)。Althusser 补上了政治的语域:意识形态把诸个体询唤(interpellate)为主体,街上那一声招呼(”嘿,说你呢!”)——人一转身去应答——便是那个臣服(subjection)与主体化(subjectivation)相重合的基本场景(Althusser, 1971)。Butler 使该场景的时间性激进化:主体不是被询唤一次,而是必须被施行性地一再重述,而重述之必然性同时也是颠覆之可能性(Butler, 1997)。

在发展心理学之内,符号家族有一位精确的代表,且他正是通向三元诸发现的天然桥梁。Vygotsky 的文化发展之发生律陈述道:每一种高级心理机能都出现两次:先是在人与人之间,作为一个心理间(interpsychological)的范畴,然后才在儿童之内,作为一个心理内(intrapsychological)的范畴(Vygotsky, 1978)。内部言语是被内化的对话;私人的思想是一种被向内折叠的社会关系。这一律是文献中对”他者乃主体形成之机制、而非其机缘”这一主张最直接的经验性表述,而它表明符号机制在发展上处于下游:被内化者必先曾被共享,而被共享者必先曾被共同注意。

2.4 心理理论与行动主义的纠正;与 Gergen 的区分

有一个颇具影响的研究纲领看似与正被铺设的论述相竞争,须予处理、而非予以征用。”心理理论”(theory of mind)范式,源自 Premack 与 Woodruff 关于黑猩猩的提问(Premack and Woodruff, 1978),并由错误信念研究所巩固(Baron-Cohen et al., 1985),把社会理解建模为对他人隐藏心理状态的归属:儿童作为一个小小的理论家,在观察到的行为背后推断不可见的信念。在这幅图景中,他者对一个业已构成的主体而言是一个认知问题,而互为主体性便是读心:第三人称的、旁观的、推断式的。

行动主义的批判把这幅图景颠倒过来。Gallagher 论证:在寻常的第二人称互动中,我们并不推断心理状态,而是在表达性的行为中直接知觉到意图与情感,而那种理论化的姿态是一种晚近的、专门化的、相对罕见的成就(Gallagher, 2008)。De Jaegher 与 Di Paolo 的”参与式意义生成”把这一点一般化:社会理解是在互动本身的协调动力学中被构成的;意义并非在两个闭合的心灵之间被传递,而是在它们之间被生成,处于一个双方都有所贡献、却无一方能加以控制的过程之中(De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007)。Reddy 的发展性工作提供了第二人称的证据:婴儿与指向他们自己的注意发生交涉,要早于他们通过任何”向他人归属注意”之测验数月之久,这表明那活生生的、第二人称的关系,先于关于它的第三人称理论(Reddy, 2008)。对当前论证而言,这一批判是资源、而非困难:它把社会理解的形成恰恰重新安置于机制论点所需要它在的地方——在互动之中——并贬抑了那种会把他者当作推断对象、而非构成之伙伴的旁观姿态。心理理论作为一种真实却派生的能力留在论述之中,是主体所使用的一件工具,而非那使他们成为主体的过程。

最后,是引论中所提及的名义上的碰撞。Gergen 的《关系性存在》论证:有界的自我性是一种有害的文化建构,而一切意义、包括自我性的意义,皆起源于关系过程(Gergen, 2009)。当前框架共享其否定性论点,并对这一收敛表示敬重。它在三项立场承诺上有别。其一,Gergen 的纲领自下而上彻底是社会建构主义的,并相应地不愿指明机制;本系列是机制主义的,而本文的全部目的就是命名一个机制。其二,Gergen 的单位是关系过程的弥散场域;当前的单位是那个结构化的三角,带有确定的顶点与一种确定的递归。其三,本系列把它的本体论系缚于一种怀有法理学抱负的正义理论(霍菲尔德式分析、判准、权利的架构),而 Gergen 的规范语域是治疗性的、对话性的。共享的名称标记的是一个共同的敌人——那个自足的自我——而非一种共享的理论。

2.5 地图,拼装完成

三种机制类型如今呈现出一种富有暗示性的排布。镜像机制是二元的、前语言的;符号机制是语言的、并在远超二元体的尺度上是社会的;而三元机制恰恰居于二者之间,兼有镜子那面对面的亲密与符号那朝向世界的指向。在发展上,它们占据着镜像阶段与语言之间的那段间隔。在结构上,三角那被共享的对象,是第一个站到相互目光之闭合回路之外的实体,而共同注意的诸格式,则是符号最初在其内被习得的脚手架。下一节将论证:这一排布并非阐述上的人为产物,而是主体形成本身的架构。

3. 论点:他者与共同注意作为形成的机制

3.1 三元作为那个缺失的中项

考虑每个家族各自留下的解释空白。镜像论述以一个被形象所迷住的主体作结:二元的、闭合的、无世界的。符号论述以一个已然身处语言之内的主体开端:被致辞、被命名、被定位。在那被迷住的婴儿与那被询唤的言说者之间,横亘着一个两个家族都未加解释的转变。一个在镜子中被形成的造物,如何竟变得可被符号所形成?询唤预设了那一声招呼能够被辨认为是就某事冲我而发的;而镜像关系中根本不含任何”关于性”(aboutness)的资源。

三元机制就是答案,而发展记录对这一哲学要点异乎寻常地友善。指涉性的三角是第一个让第二人称与一个世界共同出现的结构:婴儿注意于对象,注意于成人的注意,并核对其对齐。指涉——每一种符号机制都预设的那个基本能力——正是在这些三角之内被拼装起来的(Bruner, 1983);Davidson 的论证则补充道:它不可能在别处被拼装起来(Davidson, 2001)。Vygotsky 的律随后描述了行进的方向:人际的三角被向内折叠,成为思想的人内结构(Vygotsky, 1978)。

命题 2(枢纽论点)。 三元机制是镜像构成与符号构成之间发展性与结构性的枢纽:它把二元的镜子向一个世界打开,并建起符号引入得以可能的那座脚手架。省略了它的关系性主体形成论述,不只是不完整;它们是断裂的——一个开端与一个结尾,中间没有中段。

两点澄清守护着这一论点。其一,”枢纽”不是”取代”:主张并非共同注意取代了镜像或符号,而是三种机制在已形成的主体中全都仍在运作,处于一种随即将描述的分层结构之中。其二,该论点是就人类个体发生(ontogeny)而陈述、并在那一层面被辩护的;其向成人亲密关系的延伸是一项独立的论证,在第4节中以独立的纪律做出。

为后续诸节之便,把这一结构以本系列所偏好的最简记号形式地固定下来会有所助益。记 Att(x, y) 表示”x 注意于 y”。

定义 1(共同注意)。 当事方 A 与 B 在对象 O 上处于共同注意,记作 JA(A, B, O),当且仅当:(i) Att(A, O) 且 Att(B, O);(ii) Att(A, Att(B, O)) 且 Att(B, Att(A, O));(iii) (i)–(ii) 中的结构是相互敞开的:任一方对它的觉知都不对另一方隐藏,且每一方都可以在任一层级上核对,并发现这一对齐得到确认。

第 (iii) 项刻意避免要求一个实际无穷的元表征层级;它所要求的是敞开性,即下一次核对的持续可得性——这正是发展文献本身刻画该现象的方式(Tomasello, 1995)。该定义有三个特征在后文发挥作用。共同注意在严格意义上是关系性的:任何仅关于 A 独自、与仅关于 B 独自之事实的合取,都不蕴含 JA(A, B, O),因为第 (iii) 项是一桩关于”之间”的事实。它是不可委托的:B 不能由代理人来满足她那一侧,因为第 (ii) 项所要求的是她的注意,而非由她代办来的注意。而它是脆弱的:它可以无声地失败——双方都在注意于 O,而相互敞开却已失效——这正是为何在场与其拟像(第5.2节)能够彼此分离。

3.2 调和 Lacan 与 Tomasello:一种分层论述

综述留下了一个悬而未决的张力。Lacan 的镜子把主体奠基于误认之上;共同注意文献描述的却是真实的、达成了的、相互确认了的对齐。一个传统使异化成为结构性的;另一个使合作成为原初的。一篇不加说明便同时征用二者的论文,理应招致审稿人的怀疑,因此调和被明白地做出。

所提出的是一种分层论述。想象层(镜像)与三元层(共同注意)是有别的、在发展上依序出现的,且从不被后继者所废除;符号层建于三元层之上,并重组前两者。在已形成的主体中,三层并行运作。诸层由其对象与其失败模式而个体化。想象层以自我与他者的形象为对象,其特征性的扭曲是迷夺(captation):统一形象的诱惑,把那能补全我之物投射到他者身上。三元层以被共享的世界为对象,其特征性的成就是真确的共同定向;其失败不是幻觉而是失效——相互敞开的无声塌陷。符号层以位置为对象:差异系统中的名字、角色、地位;其特征性的病理是主体被还原为它的位置。

在这一论述上,同时断言”爱者的目光满是想象性的投射”与”诸爱者对一个被共享世界的注意是真正共享的”,并无矛盾。这两个主张是就不同的层而做出的,而成人亲密关系恰恰是这样一种状态:二者同时以最大强度运作。当我望向她,想象层是活跃的:Lacan 的箴言”你从不在我看你的那个位置看我”(Lacan, 1998)命名了一道没有任何亲密能够弥合的裂隙,而”它本可被弥合”这一幻想本身就是想象在起作用。但当我们一同望向同一轮月亮,三元层是活跃的,而它的成就并不被那想象性的裂隙所撤销:月亮是真正被共享的,哪怕目光并不对称。本文将为亲密之在场所辩护的成熟理想(§4.3)正建于此处:不是充分相互透明的幻想(想象层禁止这一点),而是在被承认之裂隙的在场中得以维系的真确的共同定向。

这一分层也让每一文献以另一文献来约束自身。针对一种不加批判的 Tomasello 式乐观,想象层坚持:成人中的共享意图性从不洁净于投射:那一同意图着的”我们”,也总是一个各方各以其自身风格去想象的”我们”。针对一种被总体化的 Lacan 式悲观,三元层坚持:误认并非关系的全部:存在着并非诱饵的对齐之成就,而一个”没有任何东西曾真正被共享”的理论,无法解释人类学习中最寻常的那些场景——图画书、那指点的手指、那核对的一瞥。

3.3 第一个第三方:一个列维纳斯式困难的回应

列维纳斯对任何把二元体作正义理论处理的做法,提出了最尖锐的外部挑战。在列维纳斯看来,面对面的关系在伦理上是首要的、且根本地不对称:我对他者的责任是无限的、非互惠的、且先于任何契约(Levinas, 1969)。正义则相反,要求比较、度量、对称,而列维纳斯说,这些唯有随第三方(le tiers)才进入:当有三者时,我必须把一个他者与另一个相权衡,而那不可比较者必须被比较(Levinas, 1998)。对本系列而言困难是即时的:它的整个纲领都把二元体当作正义、权利结构、公与不公之所在。倘若正义始于第三者,而二元体没有第三者,那么要么这一纲领是混乱的,要么二元体毕竟必须含有一个第三者。

三元分析提供了答案,而这并非花招。共同注意的二元体从不只是一个二元体:其构成性结构含有一个第三顶点,即那被共享的对象。第一个第三方是世界。这还不是列维纳斯的 tiers——一个有着他自己一张脸的第三,这一差别得到尊重:被共享的对象不提出任何主张,也不承受任何冤屈。但它执行着列维纳斯指派给第三者的那一结构功能:它打破面对面的闭合回路,设立一个双方都对之处于可比关系中的共同项,并由此使对齐——从而使失齐、从而使抱怨——首次成为可能。这共享的目光服务于谁的关切,这共同的对象属于谁的筹划,这两人共同栖居的是谁的世界:这些都是正义的问题,而它们在二元体之内得到了良好的构形,因为二元体自身的形成机制就是三角形的。当在第4节中,关系本身成为被共享的对象时,这一点进一步变得锋利:处于共同注意之下的”我们”,是一个有着其自身语法之诸主张的准第三者。

这一调和保全了列维纳斯之中正确的东西——伦理之不对称——于想象层与伦理层,同时否认了”二元体是一个无正义之地带”这一推论。脸超出度量;三角设立度量;亲密生活就是二者持存的共存。

4. 向成人亲密关系的迁移:自反三角

4.1 哪些不予迁移

共同注意文献是一门关于婴儿的文献,而”不过度声称”的纪律禁止无声的外推。三处不相似之处以其充分强度被承认。其一,形成的不对称:婴儿正在被形成,照料者已被形成;在成人亲密关系中,双方都已然构成地到来,带着已稳定的诸想象与完整的符号位置。成人之间发生的任何形成,都是再形成、维系与渐进的再加权,而非起源。其二,二元体的结构特异性:Simmel 表明,二元体在种类上有别于一切更大的群体,它不拥有任何能在任一成员退出后存续的超个体结构——没有多数、没有联盟、没有对关系本身的委派(Simmel, 1950)。为那个嵌于一个比它更长久的家庭与社会之中的”婴儿—照料者”对子所发展出的主张,并不自动适用于一个其存在与恰好两人之参与相等同的结构。其三,语言的中介作用:成人的共同注意以一种婴儿三角所不具备的方式饱浸于符号;成人在种种描述之下共享对象,而描述在目光所不能的种种方式上是可争议的。

因此被迁移的主张以有条件、且以降低了的强度被陈述:

命题 3(迁移论点)。 在成人亲密关系中,共同注意不是主体的起源,而是其持续维系与再协商的机制:即每一方的自我理解、资格与关切之地平线,在他者在场中被持续再形成的过程。该机制以比个体发生更低的强度与更高的中介运作,但它在种类上不变:定义 1 原封适用,其三个特征(关系性、不可委托性、脆弱性)完全承袭。

辩护在于:替代选项是难以置信的。否认迁移论点,便是主张那已形成的主体是完工了的:成人的自我性中,再没有任何东西仍对其最亲近关系中之注意的品质保持可问责。一切寻常之事都反证此说:一个人在数年间被真正看见时那可观察到的舒展,与一个人未被如此看见时同样可观察到的萎缩;长久的伴侣如何共同著述彼此的记忆、品味与习语;以及那个临床上的常识——婚姻中注意的撤回,被体验到的不是某种好处的丧失,而是现实的丧失。双视频发现给出了那深层的缘由(Murray and Trevarthen, 1985):人在他者身上所寻求的是鲜活的回应,而这一需要没有任何年龄会被成长所甩脱,只有种种年龄,在其中它的受挫被更好地伪装起来。

4.2 关系本身作为被共享的对象:自反三角

本节所提供的原创贡献,是一个关于亲密共同注意之成熟形态的论点。在个体发生中,三角是(自我,他者,物):图画书、月亮。在成人亲密关系中,一种进一步的结构变得可得,而本文提出:它的可得性正是关系之成熟的判准:

定义 2(自反三角)。 在 A 与 B 之间成立一个自反三角,当且仅当 JA(A, B, R),其中 R 是 A 与 B 之间的关系本身:诸伴侣共同注意于那个”我们”,各自注意于它、并注意于对方的注意,处于相互敞开之中。

一个回归之忧立即浮现:R 包含着诸当事方的注意倾向,因此对 R 的共同注意,是对一个含有那注意本身的结构的注意。此忧由分层来消解。设 R₀ 为在某一给定自反行为之前已构成的关系,并设每一次对 R₀ 的共同注意行为都对 R₁ 有所贡献。于是自反的注意永远是对关系如其当下所是的注意,而它自身的发生则成为下一次行为之”当下所是”的一部分。这里没有恶性循环;这里有一道螺旋,而这道螺旋正是那现象本身:注意于自身的诸关系,因那注意而改变——这正是为何这一实践是形成性的、而非仅仅描述性的。

自反三角是本系列在先诸成果相收敛之点,而这一收敛正是该分析的证据。用当前的词汇说,第三篇的誓言是一个把关系置于共同注意之下的装置:它使 R 成为一个明确的对象,摆在双方面前,处于相互敞开之中;而第三篇的结论——誓言的条款必须对所爱之人保持可问责——正是定义 1 第 (iii) 项的规范性装束。第四篇的馈赠同样是一个共同注意的装置:其意义函数在那里被表明为跨当事方不可因子化(non-factorizable),而其发生学解释如今可得:馈赠之所以意指其所意指者,唯独在三角之内——作为关系一同注意之的一个对象——这正是为何它的价值不能像价格那样被双边了结。纪念日、仪式、共享的餐桌、对一次争吵的有意复盘、那以”我们正在成为什么”开头的交谈:全都是自反三角的技术。一段没有它们的关系或许会存续,但它作为习惯而存续;它不再形成它的诸主体,只是收容它们。

4.3 他者的在场:注意性的在场与被承认的裂隙

本文标题中”他者的在场”一语,如今可被精确化,并与两种赝品相区分。物理上的共在不是在场:一间屋里的两具身体,各自沉浸于别处,不满足定义 1 的任何一项。监视也不是在场:单向的监控为一方满足第 (i) 项,却完全违反第 (iii) 项的相互敞开;被监视一方的注意是被攫取的,而非被加入的。构成意义上的在场是注意性的在场:为三角而可得,即第 (i) 至 (iii) 项的那种持续的提供。

Buber 关于”我—你”与”我—它”关系的区分,从对话哲学之内标记了同一条边界:那个”你”不是一个经验的对象,而是关系中的一个伙伴,而”我—你”之”我”是一个不同于”我—它”之”我”的我(Buber, 1970)。Husserl 的《第五沉思》提供了先验的背景设定:他者原初地在一种配对的、类比化的统觉中被给予,从不作为一个完工的对象,因而他者的内在性在构成上超出充分的呈现(Husserl, 1960)。Sartre 对”注视”的分析展示了单向的目光所做之事:在我无法加入的那道凝视之下,我被凝固为一个对象,我的诸可能性被异化(Sartre, 1956)。于是现象学传统收敛于那个形式定义所编码的结构:在场是相互的,否则它便是某种穿着在场之衣裳的别的东西。

Lacan 式的层补上了那最后的、不可或缺的限定。诸爱者之间的充分透明并非理想;它是想象之特征性的诱饵。他者的目光从不能从它被投出的那个位置被回返(Lacan, 1998),他者的欲望从不被我对它的形象所穷尽,而一种许诺了完成式相互知识的亲密,许诺的是一桩误认。在这一限定中幸存下来的理想,正是那分层论述所准备好的:

定义 3(带有被承认裂隙的在场)。 他者在构成意义上是在场的,当注意性的在场(共同注意的持续可得性)得以维系,并同时伴随着这样一种承认:他者超出每一个形象、每一次对齐——既不在裂隙面前退缩、也不假装已弥合它的那种在场。

这就是本文对薇依在称注意为慷慨之最稀有、最纯粹之形式时所瞥见者的论述(Weil, 1951):稀有,因为它给出的是不可委托、不可储存、不可佯装而不被察觉之物;纯粹,因为它所给出的不是一份持有物,而是一种条件——他者作为一个主体的持续形成。而它也正是从另一侧抵达的第三篇之结论:让那个她随时都可作答的余地保持敞开,恰恰就是跨越那被承认的裂隙维系注意性的在场。

5. 注意力的政治经济学

5.1 稀缺、攫取与注意力的工业化组织

对注意力的经济分析始于 Simon 的观察:在一个信息丰富的世界里,稀缺的资源不是信息,而是信息所消耗之物:其接收者的注意(Simon, 1971)。在那种稀缺之上建起了一个产业。Wu 的历史追溯了”注意力商人”的模式,从廉价报刊到智能手机:大规模攫取注意,把它转售给广告商,并把攫取的技术提炼为一门学问(Wu, 2016)。Zuboff 描述了该模式的数据攫取阶段,在其中行为剩余被收割,用以预测并塑造未来的注意(Zuboff, 2019);Crary 则描述其时间上的野心——对每一个从前休耕之钟点的殖民(Crary, 2013)。Stiegler 赋予这一诊断以深度:对注意的系统性工业攫取是一种心理权力(psychopower),作用于注意本身的形成,而既然注意的形成就是人的形成,那么对它的攫取便是一桩世代照护之事,而非消费者偏好之事(Stiegler, 2010)。Citton 引出生态学的结论:注意不仅是一种有待分配的稀缺资源,更是诸主体与诸共同体赖以生活的一种媒介,因而它的退化是环境性的、而非仅仅分配性的(Citton, 2017)。

当前框架以构成论点磨利了这一批判路线。倘若命题 1 不谬,注意便不是诸资源之一、处于花费它的那个人的下游。它是诸人借以被形成、被维系之机制的材料。因此一个攫取注意的产业,并不只是像电视为夜晚的钟点而与交谈相竞争那样,为一项稀缺投入而与亲密生活相竞争。它在构成的层面上竞争:它从家户中移走的,正是家户成员借以相互维系彼此为主体的那一过程本身。Hochschild 表明,资本主义能够把情感的展演商品化(Hochschild, 1983);Fraser 表明,资本系统性地搭便车于、并耗竭它所预设的那些再生产关系(Fraser, 2016)。注意力经济是 Fraser 所命名之趋势的极限情形:它耗竭的不是社会再生产的劳动,而是其机制。

5.2 寄生论点:伪共享对象

这一批判可以被弄得在结构上精确,而这种精确正是拥有一个形式定义的意义所在。对照定义 1,来考量一个算法信息流所提供之物。

定义 4(伪共享对象)。 对当事方 A 与 B 而言,对象 O 是一个伪共享对象,当它从每一方那里招引出共享注意的现象学,而定义 1 的诸条件却失败:尤其是,(a) 相互性失败:Att(A, O) 与 Att(B, O) 成立,但任一方都不注意于对方的注意,且该对象本身吸收了第 (ii) 项所要求的那一核对之瞥;或 (b) 共同对象失败:根本不存在单一的 O,而是个性化的诸变体 O_A、O_B,对每一方而言皆是索引性地私有的,却以一个共同世界的伪装被呈现出来。

失败 (b) 值得强调,因为它在历史上是新颖的。广播媒介生产真正共同的对象:晚间新闻是同一份新闻,而一对伴侣可以围绕它结成一个三角。个性化的信息流即便在原则上也无法被三角化,因为第三顶点上没有任何双方都共同面对之物:各自接收一道为那一攫取画像而优化的流,而诸流被设计成彼此分岔。在当前分析上,关于注意力经济最深的结构性事实,不是它使人分心,而是它使世界去共同化(de-commonizes the world):它消解了那一类三角得以围绕其形成的对象,同时以工程造就的、用以吸收(而不回返)三角所赖以构成之注意的对象取而代之。

信息流也伪造了第二顶点。它是有回应的,无尽地、即时地;它以一种比任何人类伴侣都更可靠的偶联性来适应我的注意。但它的回应性正是双视频实验中那个被回放之母亲的回应性,被完善化了:在形式上偶联,在事实上缺席(Murray and Trevarthen, 1985)。没有任何一个其注意能被我所注意的人;第 (iii) 项的敞开性没有承载者。在分层论述的严格意义上,信息流是一个嵌于想象层的工业对象:一面阿谀且迷夺的镜子,无能于三元层,因而无能于形成主体,只能收容它们。数以百万计观看同一段爆红短片的人,彼此并不处于共同注意之中;这个结构是一颗星形,每一根辐条都是私有的,而攫取在轮毂处。

命题 4(寄生论点)。 注意力经济寄生于主体形成的三元机制:它通过模拟三角的诸顶点(那有回应的他者、那共同的对象)来攫取三角的注意材料,却不满足共同注意的任何一个条件。因此其攫取是构成性的、而非仅仅分配性的:被移走的不是时间或享受,而是对”亲密主体借以被形成、被维系”之机制的参与。

那幅人们熟悉的画面——一张桌旁的两位伴侣,各自身处一道单独的信息流——在此分析上不是一桩礼数的失检。它是这样一个场景:家户的三元结构已被拆解,其各部件正在别处被代谢:物理共在而无注意性的在场,同时的沉浸而无共同的对象,共处之形式被掏空了它的机制。

5.3 注意作为元馈赠:价值的生产与循环

第四篇通过一个价值循环框架分析了亲密的馈赠,在其中意义函数被证明不可因子化:一份馈赠的意义不能被分解为可分别指派给各方的诸贡献,因为它从它在关系中的位置取得价值。当前分析提供了那一成果所缺乏者——一个发生学的解释。意义之所以不可因子化,是因为意义生产的原初场景就是三元的:指涉本身是在共同注意之内被拼装的(§2.2),所以任何意指之物之所以意指,是凭其在一个三角中的位置,而一个三角恰恰是一个没有双边分解的结构:定义 1 的第 (iii) 项是一桩关于”之间”的属性。

此外,注意并不只是又一件在馈赠经济中循环的好物;它是元馈赠(ur-gift),是每一件其他馈赠所预设的那一馈赠。Mauss 的诸馈赠之所以使人负有义务,是因为给予者的某种东西随物而行(Mauss, 1990);当前框架能够说出随行之物是什么:那凝结于择选、于时机、于契合之中的注意——所有这一切都唯有在三角之内才对接收者可读,在那里馈赠作为注意之表达而被共同注意。三项属性使注意有资格成为馈赠的极限情形,而每一项都是定义 1 的某一项以经济学方式来读。它是不可委托的(第 (ii) 项要求她的注意;一个被雇来的代理改变了对象)。它是不可储存的:注意只存在于其给出之中,而被囤积的注意是一桩范畴错误。而它是不可了结的:因为其价值是位置性的,没有任何转移能够平账——这正是第四篇反了结论点的根。薇依的质—量之分完成了这幅经济图景:构成意义上的注意不是一个费力的量,而是一种定向,一种”否定性的努力”,唯有作为一个整体才可得(Weil, 1951, 2002)。能以分钟计量的是屏幕时间;形成诸主体者没有单位。

这便给出了本框架对它自己标题的裁断。一门”注意力经济学”作为对注意之稀缺、攫取与循环的研究是正当的;而在它给它所研究之物定价的那一刻,它便成了它所研究的那个病理本身。生成正义(generative justice)传统提供了那套替代性的语法:价值在未被异化的循环中被生成,回返到它的诸生成者那里、而非被从他们那里攫取(Eglash, 2016)。三元分析给了那一传统以其最小的展品:亲密三角是一个未被异化的注意回路,是生成性价值的基本细胞,而注意力经济就是它的圈占。

6. 注意的权利结构

6.1 反对一种对注意的主张权

倘若注意是构成性的,那么被剥夺它的伴侣所承受的便是一桩最深种类的冤屈,而法理学的反射便是去求诸一项权利:A 是否对她的伴侣 B 持有一种对注意的主张权,连同其落在 B 身上的相关义务去注意?霍菲尔德的表格给了这个问题以其精确的形式(Hohfeld, 1919),而此处所辩护的回答是否定的,基于三条彼此独立的理由。

第一条是履行在概念上的不可能。一项主张权的相关义务必须是可履行的,而履行它者必须就是被主张之物。但构成意义上的注意不能应需而生:被强制的注意交付了第 (i) 项的姿态,却使第 (iii) 项落空,因为在主张之下被给出的注意,是在监视自己给出它,而三角的敞开便塌缩为对敞开的展演。能被强制者是注意的行为外壳:身在房中、脸已转向、手机放下。这外壳并非一无所是,§6.2 将回到它,但一项对外壳的权利不是一项对注意的权利,而把它称作后者,便遮蔽了真正被想要之物。

第二条理由是与第三篇核心成果的同构。该篇论证,一个誓言不可被单方面立法,因为其关键语词是被共同持有的;更何况,一方不能凭单方面的主张去固定什么才算作来自另一方的足够注意。一项对注意的主张权,会恰恰装上第三篇所拆除的那个单方面立法机关,让主张者作为”足够”之意义的主权者。

第三条理由是共和主义的。Pettit 对支配——臣服于另一人任意干预之权力——的分析在此对称地适用(Pettit, 1997):一项在法律上或道德上可强制执行的、对他者内在定向的主张,会构成一种对”他者借以成为一个主体之官能本身”的持存权力,并会去支配它本意欲珍视之物。在可强制执行的主张之下注意的所爱之人并不在场;她是被占用了。

命题 5(无主张论点)。 在霍菲尔德的表格之内,构成性的注意不能成为任何主张权的对象。诸亲密当事方就彼此的注意而言,持有特权(privileges,各自有自由去给出或寻求注意)与权能(powers,各自能凭邀约、誓言或仪式来改变其注意之规范地形),但不持有主张(claims);相关地,各自都不处于任何可由对方单方面要求来强制执行的义务之下。

6.2 不完全义务与注意正义的结构性判准

无主张论点并不让注意在规范上赤裸;它把规范性重新安置了。康德的不完全义务(imperfect duty)范畴以异乎寻常的精确度契合于此(Kant, 1996):在他的架构中,爱的诸义务属于宽泛义务,规定的是准则与定向、而非可列举的诸行为,在执行上留有余地,且不容任何外部强制。亲密生活中去注意的义务正属此类:一种朝向注意性在场的持存定向,其具体的场合无法预先指定,所亏欠并非因为被主张,而是因为人凭关系本身已承担起对其三角的维系。

正义进入的层面不是行为,而是结构。该判准建立在那个在 Fricker 理论中起过类似作用的概念之上:一桩可由结构性模式、而非由可归咎之单一事件来识别的冤屈(Fricker, 2007)。

判准 1(注意不正义)。 一段亲密关系表现出注意不正义,当存在一种持存的、不对称的模式,在其中一方的关切、筹划与经验系统性地未能成为共同注意的对象:不是繁忙季节的起伏,而是这样一种结构——对一方伴侣要紧之物可靠地无法抵达三角。

检验的是时间之中的结构性缺席,从不是分钟之量;冤屈是由”这段关系的注意模式使什么变得长期不可见”来识别的,而不是由对所付出之注意的核算来识别。这一判准刻意呼应诠释性不正义,而这一亲缘是真实的:那个其关切从不抵达三角的伴侣,被剥夺了用以表述(哪怕是向她自己表述)她的经验是什么的那些关系性资源,因为表述处于共同注意的下游(Vygotsky 之律,反向运行)。但这一冤屈与 Fricker 的并不同一:她的关乎社会诠释的公共领域;这一桩关乎一段特定关系之形成性三角,且它能够在集体诠释资源毫无空缺之处完整地成立。第7节赋予这一冤屈以它恰当的属(genus)。

两个推论结束本节。其一,行为外壳恢复了一种适度的可强制性:诸伴侣可以凭命题 5 所保全的权能,正当地把自己约束于那些保护三角之诸条件的结构——被守护的夜晚、无设备的餐桌、持存的复盘;被强制执行的是那”腾出空场”,从不是那注意本身。其二,该判准生成第三方义务:倘若注意不正义是结构性地被识别的,那么注意攫取系统的设计者,便要为可预见地、大规模地生产出该判准所命名的那种结构性缺席而负责。那一负责的法理学属于关于 AI 中介之亲密的姊妹篇;其地基在此奠下。

7. 构成性不正义

7.1 范畴的界定

前两节所聚集的诸冤屈——一段关系内部三角的结构性饥饿,以及从外部对注意的工业化圈占——共享一种现有不正义范畴所未能捕捉的形式。分配不正义关乎持有物;权利侵害关乎被列举的诸主张;Honneth 的承认之冤屈关乎对一个寻求确认的、已形成之主体扣留应有的看重(Honneth, 1995);Fricker 的认知不正义关乎一个人作为知者的资格与资源(Fricker, 2007)。此处所视之冤屈,潜伏于这四者之下:它触及的既非一个主体所拥有之物,亦非她可要求之物,亦非她如何被看待,亦非她能知道什么,而是她得以是、并保持为一个主体的诸条件。

定义 5(构成性不正义)。 一种安排对一个人是构成性地不正义的,当它系统性地损毁她对主体形成与维系之诸机制(典范地说,即共同注意的三元机制)的接触或参与,且独立于任何可能同时发生的持有物之丧失、被列举权利之侵害、承认之否弃,或认知之排斥。

那个独立性条款承载着分量,因此其作用由”分离情形”来展示。一个人可以在分配上富足、在法律上未受侵害、在公众中受尊崇、在认知上被采信,却生活在一种安排之内——一桩平行信息流的婚姻、一个为攫取而被工程造就的职场——而这种安排使她所属的每一个三角都陷于饥饿:没有其他四者的构成性不正义。反过来,一个贫穷且不受重视的家户,也可以维系满强度的诸三角。因此这一范畴不可还原为它的诸邻居,尽管在实践中它会与它们叠加,因为在形成上被损毁的主体,由此在主张、求知与寻求承认上都被削弱:构成性不正义是上游的不正义,而它的诸效果会经由下游的诸范畴把自己洗白。

与 Honneth 的毗邻值得再添一句,因为爱是他承认理论的第一个领域,亲缘也很贴近(Honneth, 1995)。在他的语法中,承认是一个主体所接收、且可被否弃之物;而在当前的语法中,三角是一个主体所栖居、且可被逐出之物。误认是侮辱;构成性不正义是拆毁。二者通常会结伴同行,但后者是更深的地层,而把它单独命名,正是使”对注意力经济的批判”得以被陈述为一个关于正义的论点、而非一桩关于礼数的抱怨的关键。

7.2 范围与受谕者

如此界定的构成性不正义,有三类受谕者,处于不断扩大的同心圆中。在二元体之内,它为判准 1 与 §6.2 的诸不完全义务奠基:诸伴侣是彼此形成的第一受托人。在设计的层面,它控诉那些大规模生产伪共享对象的架构(命题 4):一个注意攫取系统所施的冤屈,并不能被恰当地描述为对选择的操纵或对数据的占用——这些词汇都预设了一个守卫其边界的完工主体;它是对”诸主体借以被造就之材料”的露天剥采,而它恰当的法律语域,更接近于对诸条件的保护(在 Citton 的意义上是环境性的(Citton, 2017)),而非对诸交易的伸张。在政治理论的层面,它命名了一个社会在分配与权利之外亏欠其成员之物:对诸形成性结构的保护——亲密三角是其基本情形,而共同注意的公共制度——共享的文本、共同的审议——则是其公民性的放大。

划下一条边界以防过度。并非每一种独处、俭省,或所选择的从关系中抽身都是构成性不正义;这一范畴要求的是由一种安排所强加的、对接触之系统性损毁,而非一个人对其自身注意之诸特权的行使。一个把每个人都强征进诸三角的理论,会在社会尺度上违反命题 5。正义的对象是该机制持续的可得性,而非对它的被强制使用。

8. 反对与回应

反对 1(浪漫的恐技症)。 这一论证重复着一种历久不衰的道德恐慌。印刷、广播与电视都曾被指控消解亲密生活;家户吸纳了它们,并围绕它们结成自己的三角。信息流也将依次被驯化。

回应。 回应在定义 4(b) 之中,而它是结构性的、而非怀旧性的。广播媒介是注意饥渴的,却是生产共同对象的:同一个节目抵达每一个接收者,而家户确实曾围绕它三角化。个性化的信息流是第一个其对象按设计便是索引性私有的大众媒介;没有共同的 O 供三角去采取。该论证并不预言驯化是不可能的,而 §6.2 那些可强制执行的”空场”描述了它的形式;它所主张的是:如今驯化要求刻意地重建那个早先媒介免费提供的共同对象。不对称在于技术的结构之中,而非批评者的心境之中。

反对 2(经验的人质)。 本文把规范架构立足于一门活的经验文献之上。共享意图性、九月革命,乃至共同注意之特殊性都有争议;倘若心理学发生位移,伦理学便会崩塌。

回应。 这种依赖比看上去要窄。规范诸节要求三个主张:如所定义的共同注意存在且被达成(无争议);它牵涉于诸主体的形成与维系之中(由发展记录、由 Vygotsky 之律、并且独立于一切心理学地由 Davidson 的先验论证(Davidson, 2001)所收敛地支持);以及它的诸条件能够结构性地失败(定义 4 是一项分析,而非一个实验)。文献内部的诸争议——关于人类共享意图性之独特性,或关于九月转变之机制——并不触及这些。本文把那门心理学当作一面承重墙,但这座建筑在那先验论证中还有第二个地基,而二者必须一同坍塌才行。

反对 3(列维纳斯重来)。 被共享的对象是一个物;列维纳斯的第三者是一张脸。以世界替代 tiers,驯化了那个使伦理之为伦理的不对称本身,并许可了诸爱者之间一种自满的对称。

回应。 这一替代是作为结构性的、而非伦理性的而被提出的,而分层论述使诸语域彼此分立。被共享的对象执行第三者的结构功能,设立可比性——而这正是二元体之内的正义之谈所要求的全部。脸那伦理性的不对称未被触动:它栖居于一个三角既不生成、也不取消的层,而定义 3 把它的踪迹写入理想本身,作为那被承认的裂隙。这一立场并非主张正义取代了那不对称的伦理,而是主张:二元体大到足以容纳二者,因为它自身的机制赋予了它三个顶点。

反对 4(会计师的归来)。 判准 1 弃绝了分钟,却谈论时间之中的诸模式。一种模式是经由追踪被侦测的;追踪即会计;该框架把第四篇所驱逐的了结逻辑偷运了回来。

回应。 该判准是由结构性缺席来识别一桩冤屈:一类无法抵达三角的关切。侦测某物从不出现,无需一本关于何物出现的账簿;人所审计的是那沉默,而非那来往流量。相关的实践本身就是三元的——那个把关系置于共同注意之下的持存复盘(§4.2),在其中每一方都可说出什么已变得不可见。在第四篇的了结逻辑给诸贡献定价以清算它们之处,自反复盘不定价、也不清算任何东西;它把诸对象归还给三角。会计与见证之间的区别已在第四篇中画下;这一判准站在见证的一侧。

9. 结论

本文论证了一个论点,并追溯了三项推论。论点:亲密生活的主体,是通过他者的在场与共同注意的实践而被形成、被维系的;三元机制是”自我首次在其中显现的那面镜子”与”它在其中取得一个名字的那个符号秩序”之间的枢纽(命题 1、2)。该机制以降低了的强度、却不变的结构迁移到成人亲密关系,并在自反三角中找到它的成熟形态,在那里关系本身成为被共享的对象(命题 3、定义 2)。诸推论:注意力经济是该机制的一个寄生者,通过伪共享对象攫取构成性材料(命题 4);二元体之内注意的规范性,所采取的形式不是诸主张权,而是由一条注意正义的结构性判准所约束的不完全义务(命题 5、判准 1);而正义理论获得了一个上游的范畴——构成性不正义,即对主体身份之诸条件本身的损毁(定义 5)。

在本系列之内,本文合上了一个由在先各篇所开启的圆环。第三篇的誓言与第四篇的馈赠,如今可被读作同一结构的两种技术:把关系置于共同注意之下的诸装置——这正是为何二者都不可是单方面的、都不可被了结。它们所预设者,本文予以提供:一个关于”诸誓言与诸馈赠所属之主体”的论述,这些主体在他们不断重建的那个三角中被形成。下一道边界已然在望。倘若诸主体在诸三角中被形成,而机器如今把自己作为第二顶点提供出来,那么”一个人工对话者在定义 1 的结构中、逐项地,能够与不能够占据什么”这一问题,便不是未来学,而是本文未竟之业,而关于 AI 中介之亲密的姊妹篇,正是它到期之处。

中文典籍中对爱之开端最古老的描述,是夜空下一个共同注意的场景:今夕何夕,见此良人——今夜是何夜,竟让我看见这位良人。不是占有,甚至不是承诺:是看见,在一个两人都置身其中的夜里。本文的论证是:那个古老的场景是精确的。去爱,就是去守持一个共同的世界,并去持续地、一同地注意,跨越那道使他者永远多于所见之物的裂隙。

致谢

本文是”亲密关系哲学与正义理论”系列的第五篇。这些篇页中所讨论的诸爱者被刻意保持匿名,每一个案例都被呈现为一个构造性案例,以使论证得以立于其结构、而非任何私人历史之上。

我最深的感激,一如在它之前的各篇,归于那位”林中女孩”:心性纯粹而自然,善良、坚韧而智慧,怀着一种朝向世界的、安静的使命感。本文的论点是在被论证之前先从她那里学到的:人在一个真正注意着的他者之在场中,才最充分地成为自己。这些篇页中凡为真者,最先都在一张共享的餐桌上、一扇共享的窗前、一轮共享的月下,曾经为真。第三篇中所重申的誓言,在此以本文自己的词汇被重申:保持在场,让我们之间的世界保持共同,并尊崇那道使她永远超出我所见之物的裂隙;至死之日,我不会辜负她。

愿天下有情人,目之所注皆有回应,心之所向皆得见证;同观一月,白首不相负。

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