Some followers (of accounts we’re friendly with) have probably already noticed that the former “Internet Philosophy Neighbors Club” has changed its name to “Vital Signs Maintenance Tea Party.” They may be rather baffled: what’s going on?
To cut a long story short, our community has changed its focus in matters of “knowledge”: from philosophy and the social sciences as understood in academia to a concern for ordinary people’s everyday lives beyond academia’s learned circles—their needs, discontents, and resistance.
That explanation alone probably won’t put many friends’ minds at ease. Let’s begin, then, with a saying familiar to many of us: “Love concrete people.”
Some friends react to the mere sight of this phrase as though seized by a hysterical fit. They leap up in a conditioned reflex to denounce it as “post-ideological biopolitical governance,” as “ignoring structural oppression,” as “small but certain happiness that props up the status quo,” then pit it against the universal emancipation supposedly on the side of abstract theory.
How very strange!
Why should universal emancipation be set against “loving concrete people”? If diehard conservatives use the phrase to conceal their oppression, just expose and criticize that oppression (for instance, the gender oppression and exploitation behind those tender myths of marriage and family—there are plenty of such examples). But what crime has the phrase itself committed?
Shouldn’t we seize the phrase for ourselves, use it, and push it further? Just as Žižek does when interpreting the Christian teaching of “neighbor-love”: even if your neighbor is Jewish, Muslim, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, African, a member of a sexual minority… can you still “love your neighbor as yourself = love concrete people”? (The underlying challenge is to find the courage to strip away those abstract fantasies of “race/nationalism/sexism” and face the question of whether a concrete individual deserves love and respect. There is an element of reflection here.)
If the mere fear that words or phrases have been co-opted or tainted is enough to send us out for blood, then even “healing” and “comfort” could be set against supposedly “universal progress–emancipation.” What would then be left of progress and emancipation—the “things themselves” “blossoming” “in the world” (cue solemnity)?
Deliberately assembling academic concepts into a collage of “insider jargon” and “bizarre talk”—or calling it some kind of semiotic guerrilla warfare—may once have meant something in certain small circles. But if you insist on playing these games when facing the billions of ordinary people outside academia, what looks like a deconstruction of authority is really a warped form of male chauvinism (since direct expression is impossible), the cultural elite’s smug self-satisfaction: “(You can’t understand what I’m saying, so) I win!”
All right, now that we’ve affirmed “loving concrete people,” let’s talk about what, specifically, deserves our attention—
Needing lip balm in winter and protection from sunburn in summer; struggling with distress and low self-esteem over severe acne; taking it upon yourself to learn to knit scarves and weave bracelets (rather than just buy things!); learning to cook for yourself (rather than order takeout); learning to fix a faucet and helping friends and family with theirs; tending a little potted plant on the windowsill; taking in a cat found by the roadside; calling to comfort a traumatized friend; receiving a Chiikawa plush doll; listening to idol songs when work has left you feeling low…
These voices and concerns expressed in ordinary people’s everyday lives (and there are, of course, many more…) are not “the things themselves,” not “molecular becoming-woman,” not “abstract nonhuman flesh full of intensity”—not this academic gibberish. If more reasonable thinking does not devote its energies to these needs of living people (and instead stigmatizes them by a double standard!?), guess what will come rushing in—astrology with advanced degrees!
The “tacit knowledge” of everyday life has so far been neglected, treated instead as the vulgar opposite of a “radical intellectual life.” What a curious state of affairs! When did Marx make his decisive break with the Young Hegelians, with their endless talk of “Critical Criticism” and “pure criticism”? When, as the editor of a small newspaper, he turned his attention to the “difficult questions of material interests”: thefts of wood, the division of landed property1 (there are contemporary counterparts here, such as rural women losing their land, especially women who marry outside their natal villages).
Yet today’s “German Ideology” crowd seem already to be sneering at Marx as a dead dog,2 living off secure institutional salaries, absorbed in expounding the profound meanings of the subtle words in Western sages’ original texts.
Attending to the concerns and needs of everyday life does not mean giving up intellectual inquiry—still less does it mean neglecting reflection on structures and institutions as a whole. Sociology from a feminist perspective and Marxist political economy are thoroughly worth studying and discussing, and we will continue to do so. Everyone is also perfectly free to pursue an interest in a particular thinker—as long as they don’t use it as leverage to play the intellectual patriarch, throwing borrowed authority around.
Can the subaltern speak? Of course they can. “Victory of the Common People!”3
These views have already appeared in many of our past translations, from postcolonial thinkers challenging the centering of old white men from Europe and America in academic thought to feminist film theorists reflecting on the tensions between the second wave (concerned with institutions) and the third wave (concerned with the private sphere). If, having read this far, you would like further arguments in defense of this article’s views, take a look at our earlier posts.
Going forward, besides producing all sorts of long- and short-form content (we also have accounts on Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Weibo, where platform restrictions mean we will post excerpts as text and images), we will hold special, limited-run community festivities: draw-and-guess tea gatherings, chat groups for showing handmade work and praising one another’s creations… Stay tuned!