Why not admit that it is too abnormal for a migrant worker to think of Heidegger?

Just the east wind

Two days ago, a non-fiction article in Gu Yu Labs attracted the attention and discussion of many readers. The article, titled "It's Perfectly Normal for a Migrant Worker to Think About Heidegger," tells the story of Chen Zhi, a migrant worker who dropped out of college many years ago and went to work in a factory, and in his spare time taught himself English, read Western philosophy, and translated theoretical works alone.

In the editor's note for this article, Chen's factory work, though it took up most of his life, was "repetitive and hollow." In order to be able to find the meaning of life, Chen Zhi read philosophy and let his factory work efforts retreat into "interludes". Through Chen Zhi's story, the authors and editors try to emphasize that the lives of China's 285 million migrant workers are not meaningless, but "ignored or ignored by us." But when we follow the direction the editors point out to "rediscover" the meaning of the existence of this huge group, we see an individual life experience that is difficult to say is representative. When editors "normalize" this individual effort to break down cultural divisions into a universality, what they actually overlook is precisely common sense: the monotony of workshop work by reading English philosophical works and translating Heidegger's Introduction, which has neither a universality of reality nor a wide operability in the practical sense in the current social environment. The sense of meaning that can be found inside and outside of commodified labor is always a scarce luxury for most workers, not just migrant workers. Even reading Heidegger does not help a worker gain meaning in alienated labor.

And a migrant worker is only given the value of attention and dissemination when he/she begins to study the "higher knowledge" that we praise (whether it is Modern Western philosophy such as Heidegger or calculus), and it is difficult to say whether such attention is unconscious cruelty or deliberate hypocrisy. Of course, as a narrative strategy for the purpose of dissemination, using middle-class cultural symbols as a channel for narrative circulation can often achieve the expected diffusion effect. But this mechanism of media transmission seems to reveal the weak position of workers in the cultural hierarchy. Even the survival significance of migrant workers can only be recognized by cultural elites by taking the initiative to identify with the cultural hegemony of the upper echelons of the class to cover up cultural divisions. It seems that for migrant workers, thinking about Heidegger is far more important than solving basic life such as eating, clothing, housing, and traveling—at least, thinking about the philosophy of specialization is seen as a far more noble act than the struggle for survival. Just as an "average person" should think of Heidegger, so should migrant workers strive to do so. Otherwise, they have no reason to be respected. This ignores the fact that migrant workers are more deeply constrained not only in terms of cultural rank, but also in their economic status. In fact, a migrant worker who reads Heidegger always has to pay more than a middle class and endure greater pain – and we see this in Chen Zhi. However, in the shaping of public opinion in media discourse, the labor value of "migrant workers" and the social differentiation mechanism behind the division of labor are obscured by the sacred aura of intellectual authority that caters to mainstream ideology. It was as if all inequality was so "normal" and taken for granted.

The renovation workers read and studied on the sidelines

Philosophical reflection is written as a cultural symbol of labor or class

It must be admitted that, like factory floor assembly or takeaway delivery, philosophical reading and writing is a labor that takes a lot of time and effort to engage in. In a society of division of labor, most workers actually have no time to engage in professional and professional philosophical work—although it is inevitable that everyone in everyday life will have to carry out some philosophical thinking, but we may not necessarily think that these thoughts belong to the philosophical categories of the past or the present. What would we think of philosophy?

The reality is that it is likely that we do not define what philosophy is based on the content and direction of our thinking, but rather what philosophy is based on the endorsement of an authoritative philosophical professional. Most of the philosophers of history, on the other hand, have always had sufficient leisure time to conduct research and labor. For example, Thales, Heraclitus, and Plato were born into slave-owning aristocratic families, bacon, Hegel, and Nietzsche's fathers held government or court positions, and Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Dewey's fathers were wealthy merchants. Thus, it does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that the power to decide what is wisdom and upbringing and who possesses more knowledge has long been in the hands of the elite. Of course, this is not necessarily to say that the above philosophers, when writing their own writings, always had in mind the idea of speaking for the powerful. But it is true that they can easily ignore the interests of a significant proportion of the victims, perhaps because they often do not have the opportunity and motivation to contact and understand groups outside their social identity (e.g., slaves, women, workers, blacks, human beings living outside white Europe, etc.).

And their doctrines, if officially accepted, are always easily misinterpreted pragmatically, although it is not necessarily their intention to become the dominant official philosophy.

This situation actually extends to a large extent to this day. Even though knowledge is popularized through online media, we still see philosophy as a symbol of the educated life of the non-common people's intellectual class. In the social soil that exalts modern scientific rationality and technological supremacy, philosophical training, which is regarded as "useless", has become a cultural capital for the idle class to mark identity and separate the underclass. The authoritative production of professional philosophical knowledge was also transferred from seminaries and court to university colleges. Of course, Chen Zhi's philosophical research does show that the diversification of knowledge popularization and communication channels makes it possible for more people to complete deep learning through self-education, thus actively breaking this cultural divide. But for those who have undergone philosophical training but are unable to devote sustainable "leisure" to their thinking, this disconnect between value orientation and real life may indeed easily prevent them from obtaining self-consistent satisfaction—this dissatisfaction is precisely due to philosophical poverty, but to material poverty, but can only be forced to seek solace in philosophy. Of course, we should not blame the laborers who seek philosophical help, nor should we blame philosophy, but what really cannot be spared is the social mechanism that first professionalizes and elitizes philosophy, then symbolizes and commodifies it, and then "uselessly". In fact, it is precisely in this mechanism of knowledge production that separates the majority of people from philosophy that we cannot attain the truth and value promised by philosophy. Philosophy is also really impoverished and dead because it is forced away from most people. It is undoubtedly sad when we see those who seek the truth stumble in the traps created by this mechanism of production.

What can such a philosophical mechanism bring us? At least in the media communication of migrant workers thinking about Heidegger, we only see the gaze of the class. By propagating the peasant workers' extraction of the laurels of philosophical wisdom, philosophy is not seen as a historical labor process and result, so that it can be criticized and transformed in itself, but as a symbol of the cultural identity of a specific class, so that the more stable and static the better. When we read a migrant worker thinking about Heidegger, we are by no means really concerned with the general labor situation of the migrant worker, not with his thinking, nor with what Heidegger will bring to people in different situations, but in order to once again confirm the legitimacy of personal experience across or maintain social classes, and thus once again prove the legitimacy of the social reality on which social status is the main basis for the division of labor.

And when we always express great interest in the genre narrative of a subordinate who achieves a class segmentation through personal struggle and effort, and grasps the resources (whether economic or cultural resources) that his original social status does not have, we are probably not really paying attention to class differences, but on the contrary, trying to use such narratives to cover up and even "eliminate" the existence of class differences. It is in praise of the behavior of one migrant worker reading Heidegger that it is easy to fall into the indifference and even discrimination against other migrant workers who do not read philosophical theories (they are precisely the majority) - since the migrant workers have made the feat of reading and even translating Heidegger's related works, then other migrant workers do not read, obviously because they do not work hard and are motivated - this concept is too common, but this is a typical accusation against the "injured". As the title of the article puts it: "It is perfectly normal for a migrant worker to think about Heidegger." Isn't a certain subtext of this sentence that is "it is not normal for a migrant worker not to think about Heidegger"? It is only when the subconscious mind behind this set of words is spoken so bluntly that we realize its absurdity.

Knowledge and upbringing of workers

Perhaps it is more beneficial to look at the self-cultural education of workers from another perspective: in fact, labor always requires knowledge, and in the process of labor of labor, a certain cultural paradigm and practice will always be formed.

Doesn't it take knowledge to grow and raise pigs? And some of the ballads in the book of poetry are also derived from the labor trumpet. When we ridicule Peking University students for raising pigs, we obviously disagree that pig farming is also a labor that requires knowledge. Why do we subconsciously think that Heidegger's knowledge is higher than the farmer's knowledge? When we say that it is perfectly normal to think of Heidegger, let us use the same sentence to say another kind of labor: raising pigs is perfectly normal for an intellectual. Why do we ask a migrant worker to break down cultural divisions in a way that identifies with the superior, but is afraid of the practice of going in the opposite direction?

Of course, in a situation where the existing inequality of cultural resources is difficult to improve immediately, it is equally inconceivable to ask the working people to reject the knowledge produced by the elite, the culture, and to demand that they refuse to improve their situation. However, ignoring the culture of labor created by workers and the knowledge contained in all kinds of labor is indeed a more fundamental problem. Of course, most of the working people do not have the cultural capital that the elite have, but it is precisely under this occupied cultural hegemony that the laborers' own cultural creation is suppressed and buried. For example, as Fei Xiaotong once pointed out, rural peasants appear very uncultured in the eyes of urban citizens because they spit on the ground. But the citizens did not realize that in the countryside, spitting on the ground can be buried with dust immediately. But farmers most of the time don't have the opportunity to laugh at the fact that citizens don't grow crops. The culture of the countryside has declined without discrimination and without discrimination. This is the victory of the cultural hegemony of the city over the countryside. In Six Treatises on Spontaneity, the American anthropologist James Scott mentions the frustration of urban capital culture: Henry Ford, known for his assembly line production of the T-model, had fantasized about applying the production logic of this capital industry to agricultural cultivation, so he built a rubber plantation on the banks of the Amazon River in Brazil. From the perspective of production mode, this is a copy of the standardized "Ford Kingdom". However, intensive "scientific" cultivation made the project a complete failure. Another example mentioned in the book is agricultural cultivation in tropical West Africa in the 19th century. British agricultural extensionists tried to replace the clutter of native Aboriginal orchards with a "quasi-religious belief in the geometry of planting", but it turned out that the cropping, rotation, mixed planting, and tree-lined fields that created a visual order were the sustainable farming methods adapted to the local environment.

Similarly, the working class can form its own culture. Raymond Williams, a British cultural scholar, stressed that the culture created by workers that is important for identity is a collective democracy that arises in trade unions, cooperative movements or political parties. For example, the first cooperative in the modern sense was initiated in 1844 by weavers in Rochdale, England. As a result of the growing poverty in factory labour and the continued increase in the prices of basic necessities in the local grocery stores, the workers formed the Rochdale Pioneer Society, united to open their own shops, sold food such as bread and other foods that they could not afford at low prices to other workers, and formed the core principles of democratic decision-making, equitable contribution, equal distribution, concern for the community and attention to cultural outreach. The resulting Rochdale Principles became the cornerstone of the future workers' co-operative movement everywhere. Paul Willis argues in his ethnographic work Learning to Work that the anti-school culture formed by the children of the working class is a form of struggle against class order, and that in the end these rebellious children of the working class did not accept bourgeois culture and enter the path of class rise, although this counterculture made them eventually still be included in the process of capitalist social reproduction as labor.

It is precisely in the knowledge production and cultural dissemination mechanism that suppresses and buries the culture of laborers that we are more inclined to think that it is beneficial for a migrant worker to think about Heidegger, but a 985 Ph.D. to work as a carpenter, plasterer, workshop worker or delivery man is an irresponsibility to the individual and a regression of value. This is not to say, of course, that because the working people at the bottom are able to form their own culture, they are content with their living conditions and are no longer willing to change the social conditions that create inequality in all aspects. Rather, the formation of one's own culture by the laborer is precisely a necessary factor in promoting the change of the social system (from the free to the self).

From this perspective, we will develop a new understanding of some of the cultural phenomena that have attracted much attention. For example, when the "great gods" of a labor market prefer to work for three days a day than to work in a black factory, they are not necessarily generating a unique philosophical and cultural practice. When TPism advocating not getting married, not buying a house, and not working sweeps the web, it may not be a lack of rationality and thinking laziness. When white-collar workers advocate going to work and fishing, and programmers shout slogans against overtime and 996, this is by no means selfishness that is not motivated and unwilling to go with the boss. This is the "inner cultivation" and "virtue" that belong to the laborer, and it is often more useful than the middle class advocating reading Heidegger.

Why dare not admit that it is too abnormal for a migrant worker to think about Heidegger? We now have some answers.

Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin