Revolutionary romanticism A reply to Agnes Heller

Max Blechman

The interview with Agnes Heller, ʻPost- and representation (liberal oligarchy). For over two weeks, the Ethics of Modernityʼ (RP 94) touches on what until the spontaneously formed Hungarian armies were should be a key debate among intellectuals on the Left defeated by the Communist army, the coordinated today: does a perspective critical of the authoritarian councils of workers, students and soldiers were the legacy of modern revolutions spell the end of the only organized power in Hungary. Must we really go project of political revolution, or does it on the contrary from the Communist distortion of the insurrection as entail rethinking revolution along lines largely unex- a ʻFascist coupʼ to the no less distorting viewpoint plored – or repressed – in the historical revolutions of that circumscribes the insurrection of 1956 within modernity? If Hellerʼs answer to this question is clear the framework of a will for multiparty ʻdemocracyʼ? in so far as she explicitly rejects ʻpolitical revolutionʼ Would it not be more instructive for thinkers critical in favour of ʻa revolution of everyday lifeʼ, her answer of instituted domination to examine the extent to which is not for all that without historical and theoretical the Hungarian insurrection suggests paths towards a shortcomings that deserve our attention. form of political constitution in which the fabric of Hellerʼs interpretation of the Hungarian councils of social life distinguishes and disentangles itself from 1956 is at best one-sided. To state that the councils the hegemony of state power? ʻwanted a freely elected parliament and multiparty According to Heller such a route of inquiry (in systemʼ is to blur precisely what made the practice this case Arendtʼs) is really ʻromanticizingʼ, since the of the Hungarian councils socially and politically ʻmargin can become the center for ten days, as in distinct from both historical Bolshevism and modern in 1968, but then it returns to the marginʼ. However, . If, for example, we recall the famous rather than seeing Arendtʼs attempt to think the ongoing resolution of 26 October – ʻthe institution of workersʼ pertinence of council-based self-government as mere power and the radical transformation of the system romanticization (and, for the moment, leaving aside of planning and the economic control exercised by the question of romanticism), would we not do better the stateʼ – we may understand that the movement to see how Arendt shares Kantʼs open-ended ontology, favoured the spread of councils in all the factories, that is, the omnipresent possibility of new beginnings tending toward what calls in his essay that explode preconceived limits of political freedom on the Hungarian insurrection ʻa Republic of coun- – limits that ʻno one can or ought to determine – and cils.ʼ1 For Lefort, the determination of the workers to for this reason, that it is the destination of freedom organize labour in its totality by means of the councils to overstep all assigned limits between itself and the ʻindicates that the workers saw in their autonomous Ideaʼ?3 While what Heller terms ʻabsolute autonomyʼ organs a power that has a universal significanceʼ.2 is an Idea in the Kantian sense, and ʻthe centerʼ thus Far from bridging party representation with democ- construed can only be an object of approximation, we racy, democracy qua councilist organization chal- may question Hellerʼs confusion of political autonomy lenged – and this was the outstanding innovation with her straw man of ʻabsolute autonomyʼ – just as we that would also capture Hannah Arendtʼs attention may criticize the way Heller fails to understand radical – the bureaucracy inherent both in Communist one- democracy and ʻpure democracyʼ as distinct notions, party rule (Stalinism) and in a multiparty system of and the way she thereby eliminates the possibility

40 Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) of thinking an effective political autonomy. Heller beauty and depth. And if one speaks of the level of ultimately ties a straitjacket around the ʻoughtʼ of self- morality, we have only to look at what is going on determining freedom by adopting ʻthe very miserable around us for us to stop talking about ʻprogress.ʼ Progress is an essentially capitalist imaginary and pernicious pretext of impracticabilityʼ4 when think- signification, one which even Marx let himself be ing political freedom. In other words, by means of her taken in by.7 social-democratic bias, Heller limits her appreciation of the Hungarian councilsʼ struggle for political free- To believe in the possibility – and even the urgency dom to the confines of a (then-nonexistent) empirical – of an autonomous society does not, from Castori- system (bureaucratic multiparty politics), a system adisʼs standpoint, have anything to do with either whose ʻphilosophicalʼ justification relies on the alleged progress or the progessivism that posits a teleology impossibility or ostensible ʻdangerʼ of participatory intrinsic to modern democracies but raises, rather, the decision-making (council self-government itself). The question of a rupture with representative democracy Hungarian people are supposed to have deduced the – the project of ʻa genuine democracy that includes end of political history while Minervaʼs owl was still the participation of all in the making of decisions, observing, from its lofty perch, Molotov cocktails another organization of paideia in order to raise citi- being thrown against ʻSovietʼ tanks. zens capable of governing and of being governed, as Arendt can herself be seen as responding before Aristotle so admirably saidʼ.8 the fact to Heller when she describes those witnesses Hellerʼs contention that ʻonly if you abstract from of 1956 who everything else can you talk about the autonomous looked upon the councils as though they were a society and the autonomous individualʼ has much romantic dream, some sort of fantastic utopia come more to do with the transcendental ground of Kantian true for a fleeting moment to show, as it were, the ethics and practically nothing to do with Castoriadisʼs hopelessly romantic yearnings of the people, who theory of political autonomy. Castoriadis is explicit apparently did not yet know the true facts of life. concerning the contingent relationship of ʻthe project These realists took their own bearings from the of autonomyʼ to the historically situated practice of party system, assuming as a matter of course that there existed no other alternative for representative society as a whole: government and forgetting conveniently that the What is the ʻobjectʼ of autonomous self-institution? downfall of the old regime had been due, among This question may be rejected at the outset if one 5 other things, precisely to this system. thinks that autonomy – collective and individual freedom – is an end in itself, or that, once signifi- Far from regarding their councils as a stepping stone cant autonomy has been established in and through to a multiparty system, these ʻromanticizingʼ Hun- the political institution of society, the rest is no garian insurrectionists threw the party form itself more a matter of politics but a field for the free into question. Arendt emphasizes what Heller fails activity of individuals, groups, and ʻcivil society.ʼ to acknowledge: the councils ʻinvariably refused to I do not share these points of view. The idea of regard themselves as temporary organs of revolution autonomy as an end in itself would lead to a purely and, on the contrary, made all attempts at establishing formal, ʻKantianʼ conception. We will autonomy both for itself and in order to be able to do. But to themselves as permanent organs of governmentʼ.6 do what? Furthermore, political autonomy cannot I cannot begin to catalogue the number of mis- be separated from ʻthe rest,ʼ from the ʻsubstanceʼ representations expressed in Hellerʼs brief remarks on of life in society. Finally, a very important part of the late in her interview. To label that life concerns common objectives and works, Castoriadis a ʻprogressivistʼ, for example, because he which have to be decided in common and therefore 9 believed in an autonomous society, can only bewilder become objects of political discussion and activity. those familiar with Castoriadisʼs criticisms of the very idea of progress. As Castoriadis recently argued: A corpse in the mouth In history there is no progress, save in the instru- One wonders, moreover, how Heller arrives at the mental domain. With an H-Bomb you can kill many conclusion that May ʼ68 and the ʻconfirmedʼ more people than with a stone hatchet; and contem- her idea ʻthat we do not need a political revolutionʼ. porary mathematics is infinitely richer, more power- By contrast to Hellerʼs mutually exclusive dichotomy ful and complex, than the arithmetic of primitive between ʻpolitical revolutionʼ and ʻthe revolution peoples. But a painting by Picasso is worth neither more nor less than the cave paintings of Lascaux of everyday lifeʼ (which opts for a minimalist and and Altamira, Balinese music is sublime, and the depoliticized version of the latter), the worker and mythologies of all peoples are of an extraordinary student movements that led to generalized contestation

Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) 41 in May ʼ68 radicalized the idea of political revolution it true knowledge (class-consciousness), the critique by making it inextricable from a revolution in everyday of everyday life reorients the revolutionary struggle living. Thinking the transformation of the political around the pole of subjectivity, and more specifically, sphere as coterminous with a revolution of everyday around the pole of what Marx (after Schiller) envisioned life, the revolutionaries who rejected the corporatism as the authentic or ʻfull life.ʼ11 Vaneigem bypasses of the French Communist Party and were not caught up both the old Left fetish of the ʻobjective conditionsʼ in the representation system were actually closer to the of revolutionary struggle and the vanguardist instru- ʻromanticizingʼ revolutionary politics Heller dismisses mentalization of theory to address a qualitatively other than to her own views. The return of everyday party dimension: alienated subjectivity. The new emphasis ʻpoliticsʼ spelt the end of the May movement and a on subjectivity accounts for the otherwise paradoxical setback for the revolutionizing of everyday life. In the references to Kierkegaard – ʻsubjectivity is the only words of the author of The Revolution of Everyday truthʼ – in Vaneigemʼs treatise on The Revolution of Life (1967): Everyday Life. From Saint-Just to Nietzsche through Keats, Vaneigemʼs eclectic collage of subjective revolt In its concrete and tactical form, the concept of can only be understood from within the romantic class struggle constituted the first marshaling of Weltanschauung that resituates emancipation on more responses to the shocks and injuries which people live individually; it was born in the whirlpool of existential-sensuous and less epistemological-materi- suffering which the reduction of human relation- alist grounds. In this sense (if only in this sense), ships to mechanisms of exploitation created every- Hellerʼs early ʻeither Kierkegaard or Marxʼ meets its where in industrial societies. It issued from a will to counter-imperative: Kierkegaardian Marxism – that transform the world and change life.… Yet we see is, a subjective-existential as well as social-historical the First International turning its back on artists by 12 making workersʼ demands the sole basis of a project thinking and practice of emancipation. which Marx had nevertheless shown to concern all It is important to remember that the veritable ʻcri- those who sought, in the refusal to be slaves, a full tique of everyday lifeʼ and the theoretical opening of life and a total humanity. Lacenaire, Borel, Las- Marxism to subjective experience began in France with sailly, Buchner, Baudelaire, Hölderlin – was this Henri Lefebvreʼs Critique of Everyday Life, the first not also poverty and its radical refusal? Perhaps this mistake was excusable then: I neither know volume of which was published in 1947 (twenty-three nor care. What is certain is that it is sheer madness years before Hellerʼs Everyday Life). Lefebvreʼs next a century later, when the economy of consumption major work on the subject, Introduction to Modernity is absorbing the economy of production, and the (1961), would prove key in defining the 1968 clarion exploitation of labour power is submerged by the call for a ʻrevolution of everyday lifeʼ. The criticism of exploitation of everyday creativity. The same energy is torn from the worker in his hours of work and in Marxist orthodoxy that eventually provoked Lefebvreʼs his hours of leisure, and drives the turbines of pow- expulsion from the French Communist Party here fuses er which the custodians of the old theory lubricate with a positive reassessment of romantic thought and sanctimoniously with their purely formal opposition. concludes with a fictitious dialogue between ʻMonsieur People who talk about revolution and class struggle Aʼ (thesis) and ʻMonsieur Bʼ (antithesis) who hash without referring explicitly to everyday life, without out a preliminary synthesis: ʻthe new romanticismʼ. understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such Twenty years later, in the third volume of his Critique people have a corpse in their mouth.10 of Everyday Life (1981), Lefebvre would insist that those who advocate a revolution in everyday living From Raoul Vaneigemʼs perspective the task is ʻmust recall that its themes – the understanding of therefore not to abandon the project of political revo- the reality of everyday life as having become trivial- lution but to rethink the imperative to ʻchange the ized, as having been abandoned to petty concerns worldʼ in its difference from a purely economic analy- and deprived of any meaning or of anything that sis and in the context of a broad critique of ʻeveryday may orient philosophy toward the true or authentic lifeʼ – a critique that would affirm individual creativity life – come from romanticism. And more specifically and artistic experience as the alienated content of German romanticism: Hölderlin, Novalis, Hoffmann, authentic everyday living. Whereas scientific Marxism etc.ʼ13 Significantly, Lefebvreʼs notion of a revolution (and its 1960sʼ Althusserian variant) operates accord- in everyday living is, like the Surrealist and Situation- ing to the idea that domination is based on instituted ist versions, an attempt to extend and elaborate the ignorance and that the proletarian class is, as it were, subjective basis for renewed community and romantic waiting for the theory of its ignorance that would give (as opposed to ʻscientificʼ) revolutionary struggle.

42 Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) Lefebvre first presented the revolutionary-romantic York, 1986, p. 263, my emphasis. synthesis in his essay ʻTowards a Revolutionary Rom- 6. Ibid., p. 264. 7. ʻThe Rising Tide of Insignificancy: An Interview with anticismʼ (1957). According to Lefebvre, revolutionary Cornelius Castoriadisʼ by Olivier Morel, trans. David romanticism would ʻaffirm the primacy of the possible- Ames Curtis, unpublished manuscript. impossible and understand this virtuality as essential 8. Ibid. to the present.ʼ Redirecting the nostalgia of the ʻold 9. The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Cur- tis, Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, p. 286. romanticismʼ, revolutionary romanticism would be 10. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. ʻfirmly rooted in the present precisely because its heart Donald Nicholson-Smith, Rebel Press, London, 1983, p. belongs to the futureʼ, and it would see its greatness 15. (rather than its deficiency) in being ʻunpredictable, 11. Unfortunately, the relationship between the romantic 14 thought of Schiller and that of Marx has not yet been problematic, torn between the past and the futureʼ. the object of systematic study in the English language Do we not today see a resurgence of Lefebvreʼs – Hebert Marcuseʼs pioneering pathways in Eros and ʻrevolutionary romanticismʼ in contemporary French Civilization notwithstanding. I can only call attention theory, when for example Miguel Abensour (following here to the parallel between Marxʼs theory of alienation and Schillerʼs juxtaposition between the ʻtotality of char- Lefort) proposes to ʻforge a libertarian idea of dem- acterʼ of genuine personality and the modern system of ocracyʼ and to ʻthink it as savageʼ, as expressive of ʻan fragmentation by which ʻnot merely individual persons attitude that cannot be codified or solidified into doc- but whole classes of human beings develop only a part trineʼ, and in which the demand for new rights bears of their capacitiesʼ. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795), trans. within itself the demand for new social relations, the Reginald Snell, Ungar, New York, 1977, pp. 34, 36. aspiration for another form of communityʼ?15 Might 12. The existential dimension of Situationist thought is to be it be that the poverty of modern political philosophy differentiated from the existential philosophy of Jean- results from not having sufficiently questioned the Paul Sartre (in both its early phenomenological and later ʻhumanistʼ versions). I would argue, rather, that it is most doxa that compels us to chose between utopia and instructive to return to Kierkegaard when exploring links democracy? Might we not turn our telescope to an between the existential criticism of mass distraction and alternative constellation in modernity, one which not passivity and the Situationist critique of ʻthe society only ʻutopianizes democracyʼ but also ʻdemocratizes of the spectacleʼ. See, for example, Kierkegaardʼs The 16 Present Age (1846): ʻA revolutionary age is an age of utopiaʼ? action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Hellerʼs imperative ʻDonʼt attach emancipation to a Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity class or agent and pretend that they will produce it for everywhere.ʼ (trans. Alexander Dru, Harper Torchbook, youʼ is worth developing as a coherent position within a New York, 1962, p. 35). 13. , Critique de la vie quotidienne, volume radical philosophy, as is her rendering of emancipation 3, Paris, 1981, pp. 24–5. For the relation of Lefebvreʼs as ʻself-emancipationʼ and her concomitant revaluing thought to the movement of May ʼ68, see Michael Löwy of the ʻrevolution of everyday lifeʼ. But a radical and Robert Sayre, Révolte et mélancolie: Le romantisme philosophy must dare to think the transformation of à contre-courant de la modernité, Payot, Paris, 1992, pp. 229–230. everyday life beyond state representation if it is going 14. Henri Lefebvre, ʻVers un romantisme révolutionnaireʼ, to grasp at all what could make Rimbaudʼs ʻChange in La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, October 1957, life!ʼ and Marxʼs ʻChange the world!ʼ cohere – and in pp. 671–2. this adventure the revolutionary romantic challenge to 15. M. Abensour, ʻSavage Democracy and Principle of An- archy,ʼ trans. Max Blechman, forthcoming in Philosophy liberal, social-democratic and totalitarian orthodoxy and Social Criticism. See also his Democracy Against may yet prove to be vital. the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. Max Blechman, Verso, forthcoming. There are nonethe- Notes less important differences and changes in perspective in I would like to thank David Ames Curtis for helpful postwar French revolutionary theory (from Lefebvre to comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Abensour) which will constitute the object of a future study. 1. Claude Lefort, LʼInvention démocratique, Fayard, Paris, 16. M. Abensour, ʻUtopie et Démocratieʼ, in Raison présente, 1982, p. 203. Paris, p. 30. The thinkers whom Abensour enlists in this 2. Ibid. tendency range from Pierre Leroux and 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. to Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. For a synthetic Meiklejohn, Prometheus Books, Buffalo NY, 1990, overview of this current of thought, see Max Blech- p. 200. man, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism, City Lights, San 4. Ibid., p. 199. Francisco, 1999. 5. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, New

Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) 43