Philosophizing the everyday The of praxis and the fate of

John Roberts

The following presents a genealogy and critique of studies for which the ʻeverydayʼ (der Alltag) origi- the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philo- nates in Lukácsʼs and Heideggerʼs early writing as a sophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts term of derogation, and is transformed, in Lefebvre, which radically transformed its contents after the Barthes and the Situationist International into a term Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with identifiable with the demands of cultural and social the ʻdailyʼ and ʻcontingentʼ to one identifiable with transformation is partial, not to say misleading. The the vicissitudes of cultural and social transformation shifts in cultural and critical usage of the term are far and democratization. It aims to bring into focus the more complex and open to dispute than this familiar revolutionary prehistory of the ʻeverydayʼ, at a time version of events would suggest. when this prehistory has been all but forgotten, and After the Russian Revolution, Lukácsʼs early the concept has been largely disconnected from ques- existential marriage between ʻeveryday lifeʼ (Alltag tions of social agency. As such it concentrates on the lebens) and ʻinauthenticʼ experience, with all its two major cultural-national formations which gave affectations of late Romantic ennui, was subject to a ideological shape and direction to the emergence of massive cultural and political haemorrhaging.2 Indeed the concept before its assimilation into cultural studies it was the impact of the Russian Revolution that pro- proper in the 1970s: the German–Soviet debates in pelled Lukács to question (if not wholly reject) his Marxist philosophy and culture from 1910 to 1939, and earlier writing and embrace the critical immanence the postwar reconstruction of the concept in the new of ʻeveryday lifeʼ. Furthermore, this political revision and the arrival of cultural studies in France of the concept intersects with the earlier development after World War II. Customarily the German–Soviet of psychoanalysis and its ʻsecularizationʼ of human debates are written up in the histories of Western consciousness in the conflicts of everyday experience. Marxism as no more than a thematic ground plan Although neither cognitively nor politically conver- for the postwar ʻinventionʼ of the everyday.1 Here gent, psychoanalysis and Soviet revolutionary politics I am interested in digging out its variegated uses, produce a comparable denaturalization of the every- temporalities and critical lineages, in order to restore day. Freud substituted the interpretation of everyday an expanded understanding of the term. My point, speech for neurological diagnosis in the treatment however, is not to diminish the postwar theorization and understanding of the perturbations of psychic of the everyday in France, but to problematize its life and illness, requiring the physician actively to history and incorporation into contemporary cultural listen to the experiences of the patient;3 and for the studies. first time in human history the Bolshevik seizure In this regard, the identification between Henri of power was able to break the link between the Lefebvreʼs writing on the effects of postwar commodi- collective experience of the dominated and religious fication and consumption and the critique of ʻeverydayʼ and cultural fatalism. As a consequence one should life is only half the story, as Lefebvreʼs prewar work not underestimate the utopian content of the Russian testifies. The narrative in contemporary cultural embrace of the ʻeverydayʼ; from 1917 the ʻeverydayʼ

16 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) (byt) in Soviet culture was subject to an extraordinary of the significance of Marxʼs early writing and the theoretical elaboration and scrutiny. philosophical status of Marxism as such. A good illustration of this are Trotskyʼs writings However, if the everyday was where a new world from the early 1920s in Pravda, first collected in was to be made, the concept of the everyday was not English under the title of Problems of Life in 1924 the manifest site of debate in the most influential (and republished as The Problems of Everyday Life in critical writing of the period; rather, the ʻeverydayʼ 1973).4 In this collection and other writings up until signifies a kind of a generalized point of attraction for his exile in 1928, Trotsky returns again and again the critique of prewar Marxist orthodoxy and bourgeois to the ʻeverydayʼ, as the focus of the achievements science. In this, the formation of the term in Europe of the Revolution and the site where the Revolution is inseparable from the euphoric reinterpretation of is to be defended and deepened. As the focus of the Marxism as a theory of praxis in the early 1920s in working classʼs cultural and spiritual development, Europe: the origins of Marxism as cultural critique. ʻthe everydayʼ is where the revolution is to be made Thus, in the three founding texts of the philosophy and remade in accordance with the new conditions of of praxis, Karl Korschʼs Marxism and Philosophy socialist construction. (1923),8 Lukácsʼs History and Class Consciousness (1923)9 – his farewell to a Romantic naturalization The older generation, which is more and more of the everyday as ʻinauthenticʼ – and Lukácsʼs Lenin diminishing, learned communism in the course of a 10 class struggle; but the new generation is destined to (1924), the term der Alltag is rarely used and is learn it in the elements of construction, the elements never a focus for the discussion of political practice, of construction of everyday life. 5 as it is in Trotskyʼs pre-exile writings. Nevertheless, these booksʼ revolutionary fervour is incomprehen- Trotsky was following Leninʼs directive to the Party sible without an understanding of the everyday as to shift its energies after the consolidation of power the phenomenological basis of revolutionary practice from political work to cultural work, or rather, to the and the new revolutionary epoch. As Lukács says in transformation of political work into cultural work. Lenin, ʻthe development of capitalism turned proletar- This provided an expanded space for the analysis ian revolution into an everyday issueʼ.11 and theorization of the everyday, culture, the national In this sense, as the ʻhidden moverʼ of the Marxist question and . Alexandra Kollantaiʼs work in the theory of praxis, the significance of the everyday lies 1920s on sexuality, marriage and everyday life was in the cultural, political and philosophical impact of exemplary of this shift, even if the ʻgendering of the the Revolution on a younger generation of European everydayʼ was largely absent from the theorization of Marxist philosophers. For Korsch and Lukács, the 6 the ʻeverydayʼ until the 1970s. overriding question for revolutionaries in Germany after Bolshevik power was: what are the practical A world to be made and ideological problems facing the generalization of But the Russian revolution did not just transform the Soviet revolution in conditions of ʻstableʼ bourgeois ʻeverydayʼ into an active concept, as if the concept had democracy? The insistence on a methodological return been all but dormant until the Bolsheviksʼ seizure of to dialectics, and to Hegel, in Korsch and Lukács, needs power; its revolutionary content set in motion a critical to be seen, therefore, as a philosophical and political revision of the categories of pre-revolutionary Marxist defence of Marx and Leninʼs concrete analysis of the philosophy and culture itself. The ʻeverydayʼ was one concrete situation. In Korsch this takes the general of the signifiers invoked by Western Marxism in its form of a defence of dialectics as the ʻunbreakableʼ12 divesture of prewar German Marxismʼs naturalism and core of Marxismʼs interrelation between theory and positivism, and by artists and writers in their embrace practice and the specific form of a critique of orthodox of the new technology and documentary modes of Marxismʼs ʻrationalist and negativeʼ13 theorization of representation.7 In fact, the philosophical critique of social consciousness. Korsch is emphatic: after 1917 the naturalism of orthodox Marxism and bourgeois Marxism faces a clear choice – either a collapse into science, and the invention of an interventionist art of a positive science or a return to the dialectical phil- the everyday, inhabited similar conceptual universes osophy of Hegel. in the 1920s. The ʻeverydayʼ was the means by which The importance of Hegel for the philosophy of Western Marxism contested the undialectical social praxis, then, lies in the recovery of Marxʼs con- categories of both the Second International and the nection to the philosophy of consciousness. For, in bourgeois art academy. It also enabled the recovery producing a ʻrationalist and negativeʼ theorization of

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 17 social consciousness, orthodox Marxism is incapable problems of class subjectivity, his theory of political of grasping Marxʼs Hegelian insistence on human and cultural mediation is lacking in concrete differ- beingsʼ recognition of their own alienation as the basis entiation. A revolutionary consciousness is imputed for its eventual supersession. In this respect, History to the proletariat on the basis of a hypostatized philo- and Class Consciousness is far more ambitious philo- sophical identity as the agent of its own disalienation, sophically than Korschʼs Marxism and Philosophy. distinct from the actual divisions of its identity as the Alienation is not a subjective state of being, but the subject of its own historical reproduction. ʻTo posit generalized condition under which human relations oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself – that is are lived out and experienced under capitalism. Conse- realityʼ.14 The turn to the ʻeverydayʼ is subsumed under quently, Lukács argues, the possibility of revolutionary an abstractly embodied theory of social agency. social transformation is deeply compromised by the Nevertheless, Lukácsʼs turn to the question of the forces of reification. Yet, because of the proletariatʼs ʻeverydayʼ out of Hegelʼs theory of alienation was theo- daily self-knowledge of itself as a commodity, it never- retically propitious, inseparable as it is from the need theless is able to imagine the transformation of these for Marxism to reconnect its law-giving modalities forces in its own interests and the interest of humanity to a theory of consciousness and the cultural deter- as a whole. The result is a far-reaching shift in the minations of bourgeois power. By the late 1920s the conceptualization of the ʻeverydayʼ. philosophy of praxis had achieved a kind of prescient By incorporating the objectifying effects of the anti-Stalinist status, hence its ʻclandestineʼ value for ideological mechanisms of bourgeois society into the next wave of critique of orthodoxy, in the writings an analysis of the consciousness and praxis of the of Lefebvre in France and in prison working class, Lukács opens up the capitalist everyday in Italy in the early 1930s, and Walter Benjamin in to its contradictory essence. The everyday is neither Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. ʻinauthenticʼ nor ʻauthenticʼ, but, rather, the conflictual temporal and spatial order from out of which the Lefebvre and Gramsci contradictions of class society provide the basis of In Dialectical Materialism (1940), written in 1934–35, historical and social consciousness. Hence the struc- Lefebvre returns to Lukácsian and Korschian themes. tural significance of his writings for the emergent But whereas Lukács ʻresolvesʼ the problem of media- cultural turn to the everyday in Western Marxism. tion through the idealized consciousness of the Party, By focusing on the atomizing and repetitive effects Lefebvre insists on the concrete, contradictory and of technology and commodity production, Lukács everyday conditions of mediation. In other words, he identified the concept of alienation with the expan- sees the abstract universality of historically produced sion of exchange-value into all aspects of daily life; species-being as always partially realized in alienated, he therefore aligned the ʻeverydayʼ with the carceral everyday existence. ʻAlienation is not a fixed and temporal and spatial orders of capitalism, producing permanent illusion. The individual is alienated, but the coordinates for a politics of space. as part of his development.ʼ15 But this immanent critique of the everyday is deeply The implications of this for a theory of the ʻevery- compromised by Lukácsʼs concessions to Hegelʼs dayʼ are enormous, although Lefebvre himself does logical form of the dialectic; and, consequently, by not build on these moves until after World War II. By a failure to theorize adequately the rapidly chang- drawing out Marxʼs understanding of alienation as the ing political circumstances of the period. In order to objective basis of the production of human develop- develop their Hegelian critique of Marxist scientific ment, Lefebvre argues that the dialectical method orthodoxy, Korsch and Lukács are forced to under- ʻjoins up again with a profound materialismʼ.16 But, estimate the global ascendancy of capital. By 1924 importantly, Lefebvre doesnʼt stop at a philosophical capitalism had restabilized itself, launching the Soviet critique of reification and a defence of The German Union on course for its policy of ʻsocialism in one Ideology. He extends this in the first theoretical outline countryʼ and defensive alliance with world capital- of a critical hermeneutics of the everyday: ism. In this regard there is an overwhelming contra- the most trivial object is the bearer of countless suggestions and relationships; or refers to all sorts diction at the heart of Lukácsʼs philosophy of praxis of activities not immediately present in it … the and incipient theory of the ʻeverydayʼ. Despite arguing most complex qualities are present in the humblest for the convergence between the ideological and the of objects, conferring on them a symbolic value or economic, and the importance of a return to the ʻstyleʼ.17

18 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) In short, Lefebvre reconnects the Hegelian-Marxian to reify working-class culture as the passive reposi- re-creation of the movement of the real to the alienated tory of science and theory. The upshot is a Hegelian universality of everyday life, opening up a space not transformation of practical reason into a new Marxist only for a renewed extension of politics into cultural understanding of mass culture from below, a ʻnew politics (which characterizes the early philosophy of common senseʼ.21 praxis), but for the formation of a new kind of Marxist Like Korsch, Lukács and Lefebvre, Gramsci turns sociology, in which the meanings of the object are to Hegelian dialectics to reintegrate politics and eco- accorded a relative autonomy. Lefebvreʼs version of nomics, politics and culture, into a historical account the philosophy of praxis is, in fact, the first meeting of capitalism. But unlike his predecessors, Gramsciʼs inside the communist tradition between Marxism as reflexive emphasis on consciousness and the ʻconcreteʼ a critique of the commodity form and Marxism as a finds a level of conceptual differentiation that is not hermeneutics of the commodity form. paralleled elsewhere in the early Western Marxist tra- When Gramsci began writing his prison notebooks dition. However, this ʻsuccessʼ came at a cost. As with in gaol in the early 1930s, he was faced with a Korsch and Lukács, Gramsci transforms Marxism into comparable set of problems to Korsch and Lukács: a philosophy of consciousness; knowledge is no longer how is it possible for the European proletariat to win based on the scientific theorization of a thought-inde- power in conditions where the bourgeoisie is culturally pendent reality, but is the expression of a subject. dominant? However, in sharp contrast to these writers, Yet if the weight of political circumstances leads his work on proletarian popular ʻconsentʼ to capitalist Korsch, Lukács et al. into various forms of voluntarism rule was grounded in an empirical analysis of the and philosophical idealism, this analysis of the con- structures of parliamentary democracy, hence the sig- sciousness of the effects of commodity production and nificance of his reintroduction of the term ʻhegemonyʼ modernization also provides the theoretical tools for from the pre-Bolshevik Russian labour movement. But what was to become the active legacy of the Russian the Prison Notebooks are not just a theoretical elabor- Revolution: a critical hermeneutics of the ʻeverydayʼ. ation of political strategy; they are also a philosophical If the philosophy of praxis reunites the dynamics critique of the legacy of philosophy of praxis itself. of class consciousness with the temporal and spatial Gramsciʼs work is clearly indebted to Lukács and to experiences of capitalism, Walter Benjamin and the the shift to the ʻproblem of the superstructureʼ. But his later Lefebvre develop a cultural analytics of modernist work on hegemony is directly designed to outstrip and space and time. displace the abstractly embodied class agency of both the Lukácsian revolutionary putschists and Stalinist Benjamin and Arvatov workerists. History and Class Consciousness had a tributary In the theory of hegemony, Gramsci is trying to influence on both Martin Heideggerʼs formulation of work out a theory of mediation which begins, as in the concept of ʻeverydaynessʼ in Being and Time the case of Lefebvre, from the actual contradictions of (1927) and the intellectual formation of the young living subjects and concrete objects, rather than exist- Benjamin. Benjamin and Heidegger both took seriously ing as a mere philosophical postulate of ʻconcretenessʼ. Lukácsʼs spatial and temporal critique of modernity. But he rejects any notion of a unified subjectivity, However, whereas Heidegger saw everydayness as a setting out a priori from ʻthe contradictory state of surrender to the inauthenticity of the present, Benjamin consciousnessʼ.18 In this he opens the philosophy of built on Lukácsʼs immanent critique of the everyday. praxis to what Trotskyʼs concept of the everyday took The opening up of the phenomenological content of for granted: the critical transformation of ordinary everyday experience was pursued within the antipho- experience and ʻcommon senseʼ through the socializ- nal context of Heideggerʼs writing on everydayness, ation of intellectual and moral values. though Benjamin and Heidegger shared a dislike of Common sense is not something rigid and im- notions of historical linearity. mobile, but is continually transforming itself, The distinction between the ʻeverydayʼ and every- enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philo- dayness, then, is more than an etymological nicety; it 19 sophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. defines a politics. Benjaminʼs notion of the everyday Gramsci sets out to place the ʻambiguous, contra- as a cultural category bridges the experience of the dictory and multiformʼ20 consciousness of ʻeverydayʼ Russian Revolution and the conditions of European experience at the forefront of the construction of the modernity, producing what amounts to a reconceptual- proletariatʼs cultural and political ascendancy, refusing ization of Soviet avant-garde notions of the ʻeverydayʼ

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 19 inauthenticity of publicness. Whereas for Heidegger ʻeverydaynessʼ involves a profound ʻde-severanceʼ of Being,22 of the subjection of Being-with-one-another to that of Being-for-others, for Benjamin the technological transformation of the ʻeverydayʼ was also a place of shared knowledge, a place where Being-for- others and social consciousness can be created and expanded. The tech-nologi- cally repetitive and mechanical forms of the ʻeverydayʼ are defined in terms of their powers of social connectivity. This is because for Benjamin the disclosing powers of film and photography bring the appearance of things into social and political consciousness, thereby trans- forming the everyday as the mediation of experience itself. As he states in ʻFragment of Manuscriptʼ, an unpub- lished version of ʻA Small History of Photographyʼ written in 1931,

If in comparison to art the photographic reduction of the original proves itself to be not only an organ of consumption, but one of production – that is to say of the new valorization of old works – then that holds all the more evidently for the reality of the everyday [der Wirklichkeit des Alltags]. In all areas the reproducible is on the point of placing itself at the 23 as a space of intervention in a European capitalist pinnacle of the value scale. setting. Benjamin was the first writer to import the As a result, the phenomenological expansion of the revolutionary content of the ʻeverydayʼ into the study ʻeverydayʼ under mechanical reproduction opens up of the cultural meanings and experiences of the routin- the interpretative functions of the producer and spec- ized, commodified ʻeverydayʼ of bourgeois society. tator, developing the unconscious content of looking With this, he was the first writer within Western and reading. Crucially, this simultaneous telescoping Marxism to give systematic attention to the alienations and expansion of cognition involves a critical shift of the ʻeverydayʼ as a philosophical problem of cultural in the relations of artʼs production and reception. In practice. Arising from this, the activist demands of the ʻThe Author as Producerʼ Benjamin argues that the philosophy of praxis underwent a kind of internal class differences between artists and writers and the rupture, in which the famous split in Marxʼs last thesis on Feuerbach between praxis and philosophy, action working class are superficial in a world of transformed and interpretation, was dialectically reconstituted as skills and socialized technologies; and therefore that a politics of interpretation. The meaning-producing artists and writers should identify themselves as pro- content of the phenomenology of everyday capitalist letarians through establishing their critical place in the experience became the space of political critique and relations of production of their time, just as workers aesthetic interruption; the ʻeverydayʼ began its journey should appropriate the new technologies in their own out of the theory of reification into the contradictory interests. For the Benjamin of the ʻproductivist yearsʼ actuality of commodified experience. (1930–37), this shift invites a repositioning of the In one respect, this was a direct inversion of artist and non-professional as co-participants in, and Heideggerʼs ʻeverydaynessʼ as an expression of the producers of, the everyday.

20 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) Benjamin, however, does not explicitly theorize the transformation of art into a model of scientific the ʻeverydayʼ as a category; the everyday is, rather, reflection. Just as science engages with hypotheses the taken-for-granted landscape of his analysis of in the world of the abstract, ʻso will art also retain modern technological and industrial experience. In the function of constructing hypotheses in the world this he uses various definitions of ʻdaily lifeʼ (tägli- of the concreteʼ.27 Decoration and the representational chen lebens) ʻthe dailyʼ (täglich) ʻeveryday lifeʼ functions of art will not lose their value, but people (Alltag lebens) and ʻthe everydayʼ (der Alltag) in will have a collective control over these functions as an ad hoc fashion. Nevertheless, there are a number part of a democratic culture in which the mediations of references where he focuses specifically on the of bourgeois ideology through art will disappear. In critical identity of the ʻeverydayʼ as a consequence of this, creativity is ʻto develop experiential, elastic, his critique of artʼs traditional functions. And these multiply formed and permanently fluctuating norms, occur invariably when he is discussing or recalling for the reconstructionʼ of reality. 28 Artists, scien- the social and cultural transformations of the Russian tists, engineers and workers will organize a common Revolution. One of these references is in an interview product, destroying the category of autonomous art. Benjamin did with the Moscow evening newspaper on Hence it is the job of working-class revolution to 18 December 1926: ʻIn the USSR art serves industry dismantle the gap between artists and intellectuals as and everyday life.ʼ24 That is, art serves industry and the monopoly possessors of a knowledge of beauty everyday life, unlike under capitalism, where it is and aesthetics, and society as a whole. dependent upon employers and the market. As is well In this way Arvatov argues that artists, writers and documented, this visit in 1926 to Russia played a engineers have to organize and form the everyday. crucial part in the development of his later writings. Artists, writers and engineers must be involved The sense of the ʻeverydayʼ as free from reification in ʻthe melting of artistic forms into the forms of prompted him to declare that private life had been everyday lifeʼ, a phrase that was, of course, to find abolished. As he wrote in the later essay ʻMoscowʼ, its way into Benjaminʼs own writing. Accordingly Russia is under the ʻaegis of the new bytʼ.25 In this, ʻthe problem of the reflection of everyday life is the much has been made of Benjaminʼs links to the problem of everyday lifeʼ. ʻIt is not the “everyday” productivist writer Sergei Tretyakov; little work has of workersʼ which should be portrayed on stage, but been done though on the extensive debates within rather theatre activity must unfold in life itself.ʼ In productivism and the avant-garde on the everyday, this, artistic activity will be developed according to particularly in the writings of Boris Arvatov. It is use and the demands of specific social tasks, eventu- his work on the everyday that places the political ally leaving the social needs of representational art expectations of cultural transformation for Trotsky, to ʻdie away in a thoroughly organised, integrated and the cultural allegiances of Benjamin, in a wider social systemʼ.29 The transformation of the everyday intellectual context. Indeed, Arvatov is one of the is based on its ultimate supersession as a cultural great missing figures in the debate on the ʻeverydayʼ and social category. during this period, for, unlike most of his revolution- The significance of Benjaminʼs work for our nar- ary peers and the early Western Marxists, his essays rative, therefore, lies in its point of contact between on productivism from the 1920s (published as Kunst various claims on the everyday during the 1920s and und Produktion in 1972)26 actually advance a theory 1930s, making his writing a critical confluence of of the everyday. It is not clear whether Benjamin the deepening conflict in Western Marxism between read Arvatov, given that Benjaminʼs Russian was bad, Lukácsʼs legacy of the philosophy of praxis and a although he was familiar with Tretyakov; but there hermeneutics of the everyday. Benjaminʼs work can is much in Arvatov that helps situate Benjaminʼs be seen as bridging three different concepts of the concern with redrawing the spatial and temporal everyday: the critique of the everyday as the reified boundaries of art, and the critique and supersession ʻreproduction of the immediateʼ (Lukács30); the utopian of the ʻeverydayʼ itself in Lefebvre and the Situation- dissolution of art into the everyday (productivism); and ist International. the representation of the everyday (the rehistoricization For Arvatov, bourgeois culture can only decorate of everyday life). If we have addressed the first two and supplement the real; it cannot organize it. As in some detail, we need now to elaborate the third, a result art has been pushed out of general social for it is the third which mediates the first, qualifies praxis. Productivist art, on the other hand, breaks the second, and expands the terms of reference of the with bourgeois artʼs fetishism of form by privileging ʻeverydayʼ itself as a cultural category.

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 21 Trace and remainder intervention and possible revolutionary transforma- Benjaminʼs politicization of mechanical reproduction tion, as alienated symptom, and as a utopian sign. It involves the incorporation of the ʻeverydayʼ into aes- is difficult, therefore, to talk about Benjaminʼs work thetic experience. In this sense he recognises how tech- strictly in relation to the priorities of the philosophy nology allows consciousness to interpret ʻeverydaynessʼ of praxis. For in his adaptation of a Freudian hermen- as culturally significant and motivated. Benjamin is eutics he disengages the ʻeverydayʼ from questions the first theorist of the everyday to incorporate the of systematic political strategy and class agency. For hermeneutic possibilities of Freudʼs psychoanalysis all his thinking on the temporality of revolutionary into a ʻmicroscopicʼ hermeneutics of culture. ʻSince transformation, he is essentially a theorist of how the the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have internal conflicts of historical temporality are mediated 32 changed. This book isolated and made analysable at the level of artistic form. The ʻeverydayʼ serves things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed a very different philosophical function in its guise as in the broad stream of perceptionʼ, he says in the unconscious symptom and sign than in the Hegelian ʻArtworkʼ essay.31 In fact, if Freud recast psychic life in unification of reason and praxis, in earlier Western terms of the interpretable content of everyday speech Marxism. For the turn to the ʻhiddenʼ, despised, and gesture, Benjamin recast cultural theory in terms remaindered and ʻmicroscopicʼ content of everyday of the ʻhidden speechʼ of the commodity and everyday experience unites the ʻeverydayʼ with what escapes the appearances. In this way Benjaminʼs assimilation of totalization of reason and systematic philosophy. Freudʼs psychoanalysis to cultural theory is governed In Benjaminʼs theory of the trace we see the begin- by the everydayʼs concealment of dissatisfaction and nings of the postwar distinction between the ʻeverydayʼ loss. And just as the talking cure involves the constant as that which is familiar and the ʻeverydayʼ as that revoking of the memory of trauma and the putting of which is remaindered, that which is left behind after this image into words, so Benjaminʼs understanding of the structured activities of science, technology and the everyday as a realm of alienated symptoms and social administration have defined and regulated daily signs of desire invests the interpretative ʻshockʼ of the experience. In this regard, Benjaminʼs Marxism opens representation of the sign (montage) with the power its heterodox origins to another strand of German to shatter the reified ʻreproduction of the immediateʼ idealism: Schellingʼs critique of reason as an abstract and rehistoricize the everyday. system. For Schelling, Kant and Hegel demonstrate Viewed from this perspective, Benjamin aligns an essential abhorrence of reality, in so far as they the modern detachment of aesthetic experience from reduce the living basis of things to a pregiven order. its embodiment in artisanal tradition with a non- Freedom is a matter of choice, not the result and linear conception of historical consciousness. Because development of something already immanent to Being mechanical reproduction frees the consciousness of which is revealed through conceptual understanding. the aesthetic to range over all objects and events, As he argues in the Philosphical Inquiries into the the production and interpretation of culture are no Nature of Human Freedom (1809), there is an ʻirreduc- longer identifiable with the local experience of the ible remainder [to reality] that cannot be resolved by singular, unique object embedded in an unfolding reasonʼ.33 ʻThe unruly lies in the depthsʼ, in an infinite aesthetic tradition, but with the globalizing experience breakdown of the appearance of the order and form and simultaneous effects of mechanical reproduction of things.34 itself. The concept of the ʻirreducible remainderʼ is key In this respect, Benjamin supplies the philosophy to grasping the changing political and social claims of praxis with both a theory of the discursivity of of the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ in the 1930s. For the everyday and a more complex account of modern the turn to a Schellingian–Freudian hermeneutics of temporality. His unification of historical consciousness the trace in Benjamin represents the point where the and cultural practice defines the ʻeverydayʼ in terms theorization of the ʻeverydayʼ as a revolutionary unity of its sedimented temporal conditions and relations. of theory and practice passes over into the theory of The ʻeverydayʼ stands at the conjunction of past and the self-positing creative subject. Indeed, what is strik- present, present and future, past and future, rather ing about the postwar ʻreinventionʼ of the ʻeverydayʼ than as teleologically settled and continuous with the in France is how much Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, past. Indeed, in terms of the three categories of the Maurice Blanchot, the Situationists and Michel de ʻeverydayʼ outlined above, Benjaminʼs ʻeverydayʼ has a Certeau, despite their political differences, all rework discontinuous tripartite structure: as a space of social the notion of the ʻeverydayʼ as ʻirreducible remainderʼ.

22 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) For it is the theory of the ʻirreducible remainderʼ that ʻeverydaynessʼ as the space of historically unreal- is now seen, precisely, as holding on to the possibility ized species-being. Hence the ʻeverydayʼ is not just of the critique of modernity. a space of critical decoding and redemption, but also In the 1930s Lefebvre had begun to recognize the a place of active dissent from ʻeverydaynessʼ; a place importance of a phenomenological hermeneutics as a where mass mediated and industrialized everydayness way out of the abstract anthropology and proletarian is unable completely to regulate and reify the shared identity-thinking of orthodox Marxism on questions practices, customs, forms of resistance, self-identity, of culture. However, if Dialectical Materialism and and moments of subversion of a ʻcommon cultureʼ. ʻLa Mystification: Notes pour une critique de la vie From this standpoint Lefebvre is the first writer quotidienneʼ (1933)35 were the first moves in this direc- actually to codify the ʻeverydayʼ as phenomenologically tion, The Critique of Everyday Life (1947)36 was the co-present with, but conceptually distinct from, mere concrete development of this into a theory of culture. ʻeverydaynessʼ. Lefebvre makes a fundamental dis- The Critique of Everyday Life is the philosophical tinction between ʻdaily lifeʼ (la vie quotidienne), summation of the turn to culture and ideology in the ʻeverydaynessʼ (la quotidienneté) and ʻthe everydayʼ 1920s and 1930s. This was the first work of philo- (le quotidien): ʻle quotidienʼ being the modality of sophical criticism of capitalist culture that assimilates social transformation and class resistance, ʻla quotidi- the themes of Lukács and Heidegger in order to move ennetéʼ being the modality of capitalʼs administration beyond them. As such Lefebvre identified something of atomization and repetition. For, if everydayness shockingly simple: with the massive industrialization designates the homogeneity and repetitiveness of daily and urbanization in Europe in the early part of the life, the ʻeverydayʼ represents the space and agency century, the production and consumption of culture of its transformation and critique. Consequently in was now part of the process of capital accumulation The Critique of Everyday Life, it is possible to see itself. The critique of alienation, therefore, cannot be Lefebvreʼs conceptual differentiation of the ʻeverydayʼ based on a model of reification which separates human as a candidate for the missing category of mediation practice and consciousness from the advanced techno- between subject and object in Lukácsʼs Hegelianism. In logical conditions of its realization. Marxism requires Lefebvre the ʻeverydayʼ is the category which grasps a far more sophisticated account of the production and the experience of the proletariat in the process of its consumption of mass culture than subscribed to by the own self-consciousness as a class. Manichaean defenders of ʻreification theoryʼ and party This expansion of the meaning of legitimate cultural orthodoxy. In a move comparable to that of Benjamin, experience is part of a largely dissident politicization Lefebvre recognized that the investment in the forms of the everyday under the state-led modernization of of mass culture represent the partial fulfilment of French culture in the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, needs, and therefore are irreducible to conditions of after the war there is a remarkable shift in the national alienated subjecthood. focus of within Western Marxism, from We might say, then, that the philosophy of praxis the interwar experiences of German modernization is continued by other means in Lefevbre, in so far to that of France. A number of factors produce this as Lefebvre begins to think of culture in terms of shift: the repressive political situation in the Federal ʻresistanceʼ and critique from within the spaces and Republic; the rapid accumulation of capital in postwar temporalities of an emergent culture industry. For France, drawing massive investment into the rebuilding in contradistinction to Benjamin, the philosophical of Paris, the development of the motor industry and theme of the ʻirreducible remainderʼ is not something standardized housing; the strength of an indigenous that is brought to bear on everydayness through intel- Left culture organized in alliance and dissent around lectual labour, but is ontologically given through the a politically dominant PCF, capable of explaining and autonomous self-positing of human beings. In this analysing the cultural shocks of this rapid moderniz- sense the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ is the name given ation; and a Marxist intelligentsia well placed in dis- by Lefebvre to the concrete forms of mediation of seminating and expanding the dialectical content of the dialectic of becoming, aligning the everydayʼs the ʻeverydayʼ against both Stalinist denunciations of detachment from its philosophical condescension with ʻAmericanizationʼ and the technocratic and national- Gramsciʼs ʻcommon cultureʼ. ist theorization of modernization in the new heavily Thus if Benjamin severed the ʻeverydayʼ from funded social sciences (structuralism and Annales- ʻeverydaynessʼ, and ʻrepetitionʼ from ʻrepetitive- school historiography).37 In fact, it is discontent with nessʼ, Lefebvre codified this separation by treating structuralismʼs profound lack of interest in the conflicts

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 23 and aporias of modernity in crisis which links Lefe- which-is-remaindered to the idea of the everyday as bvreʼs writing in the late 1940s to Blanchotʼs and the place where we are ourselves ordinarily. ʻNothing Barthesʼ theory of the trace in the 1950s. For what happens; this is the everyday.ʼ41 This is very dif- unites these writers is a sense of how structuralism ferent from the dream of ʻfull subjectivityʼ which and technocratic defences of modernization echo each haunts the everyday in early Western Marxism and other, replicating in a very different political context Lefebvre. If Blanchotʼs theory of the everyday brings many of the same philosophical issues around social forth a subject without social agency, in Lefevbre agency, historical change and cultural practice which the everyday remains attached to an older Marxist dominated Lukácsʼs, Korschʼs and Benjaminʼs critique humanist dream of the ʻtotal manʼ. It is the revo- of Second International gradualism. In these terms the lutionary reconceptualization of this older Marxist political defence of the concept ʻeverydayʼ as a trace notion of ʻfull subjectivityʼ that supplies one of the and remainder in conditions of capitalist expansion most influential readings of Lefebvre and the notion becomes increasingly clear in France by the 1950s: of situated knowledge in the 1950s: the Situationistsʼ that is, the ʻeverydayʼ is now identifiable on a histori- critique of capitalist spectacle. cal scale with a critique of the neutral ideology and ʻeventlessʼ change of modernization itself. Situationism In the ten years between The Critique of Everyday The Situationist International (1957–72) was the place Life and Barthesʼ Mythologies (1957), the concept of where the critique of the everyday and the philosophy the ʻeverydayʼ takes on an increasing identification of praxis reconnected in France in the 1950s and with the cultural heteronomy of French modernization. 1960s.42 For what distinguished the Situationists from When Barthes published his collection of short pieces other French intellectuals of the period was the way on the ʻmythes de la vie quotidienne françaiseʼ,38 the group carried over and developed many of the key his aim was to historicize what was judged to be themes of Lefebvreʼs writing on the everyday – such beneath serious critical attention: the implicit ideologi- as the hermeneutics of space and aestheticization of cal content of popular cultural activities and pastimes. politics – but without selectively disconnecting their With this he makes a Benjaminian move. Whereas content from the wider framework of class politics. bourgeois culture sees significance in efficiency and Barthes and Blanchot share Lefebvreʼs anti-structural- regulation, he sees truth in insignificance. Indeed it is ism, but not his interest in the everyday as a utopian the dispute over what counts as the significant event site of cultural transformation. The Situationists, on the that unites the early Barthes and Lefebvre. Both return other hand, moved back beyond Lefebvre to Lukács to the epistemological problem of where and in what and the ultra-leftist context of the early revolutionary forms knowledge is to be situated: in the longue durée debates on the everyday. In this they connect the and the abstractions of class struggle, or in the objects, concept of ʻeverydayʼ to a political tradition different gestures and acts of daily life? to that of Lefebvre: council communism and proletar- This rehierachization of the ʻeventʼ also brings ian anarchism. In fact, the Stalinist, Trotskyist and into view the work of Maurice Blanchot in the social-democratic context in which the ʻreinventionʼ 1950s. In 1959 in LʼEntretien infini,39 he responds to of the everyday took place in France from the 1930s Lefebvre, elaborating on the everydayʼs particularities. to the 1960s was unceremoniously attacked in Situ- Blanchot credits Lefebvre with having transformed ationism. This was due to what the group saw as the Heideggerʼs and Lukácsʼs condemnation of the every- dilution of the critique of everyday life through its day as the work of reification. In this he identifies Barthesian semiotic and sub-Surrealist appropriation with Lefebvreʼs immanent critique of everydayness, in the emerging cultural studies. Hence the return to its conflicted and contradictory character. As such, the early Lukács, particularly in Guy Debordʼs Society the everyday contains an oblique truth which always of the Spectacle (1967).43 escapes the law, or discursive knowledge. By belong- What the Situationists approved of in Lukács was ing to the ʻinsignificantʼ, when the everyday is lived the totalizing content of the critique of reification, his out it ʻescapes every speculative formulation, perhaps refusal to separate the economic from the cultural. all coherence, all regularityʼ.40 Thus, although the From this standpoint, the critique of ʻeverydayʼ repre- everyday is banal and platitudinous, it is the very sents the totalizing struggle against capitalʼs regime ordinariness of the everyday which brings us back of separation: between exchange value and use value, to the spontaneity of our species-being. From this public and private, art and necessary labour. As they say Blanchot links the notion of the everyday as that- in one of their first codifications of the ʻeverydayʼ, ʻThe

24 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) Transformation of Everyday Lifeʼ (1961),44 in the next generalization of the critique of everyday life as the wave of revolutionary struggle the failure to link the critique of identity and self-preservation. cultural with political is to accept the impoverishment Combining the early Romanticsʼ defence of the of everyday experience. On this score what marked aesthetic as the realm of the non-identical with a lib- out the Situationists was their re-radicalization of the ertarian version of early Marx (via Lukácsʼs theory of convergence between cultural struggle and the phil- reification) and a critical anthropology, Vaneigem set osophy of praxis within and beyond the traditions of out to revolutionize the Marxist-humanist concept of Western Marxism. For if Lefebvre identified the tem- the ʻtotal manʼ. For Vaneigem the Stalinist and Trotsky- poral and spatial organization of modernity as a means ist appropriation of the concept has been at the expense of theorizing the forms by which a cultural resistance of any plausible theory of subjectivity and human and critique of capitalism might take place, extending emancipation. Indeed, the humanistsʼ ʻtotal manʼ has this into an expanded understanding of what is judged been philosophically vapid and creatively bankrupt, to be culturally significant, the Situationists identified in so far as its is function tied to the categories of the spatial and temporal orders of everydayness as bourgeois culture and the hierachicies of the capital- the site of cultural struggle – that is, as the actual ist division of labour: a society of self-discipline and site where the imagining of a different social order self-sacrifice. In this regard Vaneigem was particularly is to be enacted. From this perspective, the everyday repulsed by the return to fatherland, family and cult of is neither the postponed site of social transformation, labour in the Soviet Union and postwar France. In fact, nor simply a hermeneutics of culture, nor an expanded it was the Situationistsʼ recognition of the structural theory of art, but the politicization of interventionist symmetries between capital accumulation in the West cultural action itself. In localized acts of disruption and the Soviet Union – a version of the theory of state and subversion, the Situationist gestus becomes an capitalism – that allows the group to systematize the act of proletarian identification and, consequently, a critique of the everyday as a critique of identity and prefiguration of human emancipation and ʻfull sub- economic self-preservation. Something historically jectivityʼ. The result is a mixture of Teilaktion-type unprecedented enters the debate on the ʻeverydayʼ: for twenties class spontaneity, aestheticized productivism the first time the critique of the everyday now inhab- and early Romanticism. ited a critique of the Marxist tradition itself, or rather These themes are developed in the only revo- its institutionalized forms in Stalinism and orthodox lutionary text written on the ʻeverydayʼ since Arva- Trotskyism. But if this isolated the SI politically in tovʼs Kunst und Produktion, Raoul Vaneigemʼs Traité the 1950s and 1960s, the philosophical moves which de savoie-vivre a lʼusage des jeunes générations underwrote their dissension are perfectly familiar. (1967), translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life This is because, like Lukács, Korsch and Lefebvre, in 1983.45 Written in 1963–65, it systematizes the Vaneigem and the Situationists turned to the phil- Situationistsʼ critique of the everyday as the realm osophy of consciousness in order to think their way of spectacle and separation, developing a range of out of the crisis of the stalled proletarian revolution terms and concepts that offer both a practical guide and the reified ʻreproduction of the immediateʼ. And, to strategies of dereification and to the philosophical significantly, it is the figure of Schelling and the concept of the ʻirreducible remainderʼ which again haunt these revisions and translations. Above all else Traité de savoie- vivre a lʼusage des jeunes généra- tions is a defence of the autonomous self-positing subject, what Schelling calls ʻactivated selfhoodʼ46 and what Vaneigem calls ʻradical subjectivityʼ.47 I cannot have consciousness of my self-determination before I exercise it; therefore there can be no proof of my freedom, separate from its exercise. In this respect Vaneigem argues that authentic self-realization is ʻlocked Cornford & Cross, Operation Margarine, 1996

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 25 up in everyday lifeʼ,48 through penetrating what is solution of subject and object, mediation and represen- universally given in consciousness. What Vaneigem tation. Indeed, by the time the group broke up in 1972, calls the ʻdesire for realizationʼ pushes the Schelling- very specific and pressing questions of mediation and ian themes of Lefebvreʼs reworking of the early Marx representation were bearing down on the dream of into a radically revisionist context for the everyday: ʻfull subjectivityʼ: the demands of the womenʼs and the critique of the everyday becomes identifiable with post-colonial liberation movements. Vaneigem and the self-positing creativity of the individual. In this the SI represent the last great moment of exchange there is a fundamental attack on mediation and rep- between cultural critique and the philosophy of praxis. resentation as rationalizing and identitary, turning the They define the point where the connection between critique of the everyday back to the utopian legacy of philosophy of consciousness and class politics began productivism. to unravel under the deconstruction of the subject But Vaneigem is not a productivist by another and the rise of post-structuralism. Accordingly, the name, despite this alignment of creative activity with conflict between the legacy of Western Marxism and social transformation and the critique of representa- hermeneutics entered a new critical phase by the mid- tion. His investment in ʻlived immediacyʼ has no 1970s, bringing the ʻeverydayʼ in line with the changed basis in an activist conception of the reconstruction expectations of cultural theory itself. For by the time of reality. On the contrary, Vaneigem identifies the Michel de Certeau wrote LʼInvention du quotidien: possibility of ʻlived immediacyʼ with the spontaneous Arts de faire (1974) (translated as The Practice of negation of the social world. Hence the importance Everyday Life in 1984),49 an emergent cultural studies of the destabilizing pleasures of play and festivity in was returning to Barthes in order to invent the ʻevery- Situationism. In this way it is the disruptive ʻmicro- dayʼ as a theory of consumption. eventsʼ or least-events of everyday life which resist or disrupt the logic of the spectacle and supply the basis ‘The creative consumer’: de Certeau and of authentically situated (non-mediated) knowledge: the new cultural studies impassioned daydreams, pleasures taken in love, the De Certeauʼs work has its origins in the wider debate sudden rush of sympathy or empathy with another, the on the everyday and popular culture in the 1970s in capricious gift (the potlatch), the spontaneous act. It France, Britain and the USA. The central concern is the link between ʻpure givingʼ and the critique of of The Practice of Everyday Life embraces what is exchange value that is key to his theory of subjectiv- to define the development of cultural studies proper ity. Through the systematic reintroduction into class in the Anglophone world in the 1970s and 1980s: politics of the convergence between disalienation and the critique of the notion of the passive consumer ʻactivated selfhoodʼ and the non-identitary, the critique of culture, a notion which was the mainstay of both of the everyday was reconnected to the supersession of 1950sʼ sociologies of mass culture and the Frankfurt the official time of consumption. In the 1950s this con- School. De Certeauʼs work, consequently, can be seen nection between consumption and dead time had all as part of an emergent literature in which the cultural but disappeared in the euphoria of the postwar boom. consumption of the many is treated as active and Modernization was the time of arrival, rarely that of discriminating, supplying the framework of what was departure. This places Vaneigemʼs and the Situation- later to be called reader-response theory. De Certeau istsʼ critique of the everyday far to the left of Lefebvre expands the self-positing creativity of the subject into and the others critics of postwar modernization. For a cultural-studies-type differential analysis of mass if everydayness is associated with the theft of self- consumption and the creative consumer. realization, in the abstract, in Lefebvre, Barthes and But if this locates de Certeauʼs theory of the Blanchot, in Vaneigem and the SI, the theory of ʻlived everyday within the political context of Lefebvre, immediacyʼ deepens and polemicizes the connection Barthes and the Situationists, his work disconnects between the critique of the everyday and the critique the philosophy of praxis from any explicit totalizing of exchange value. The theory of ʻlived immediacyʼ critique of capitalism. The critique of the sign, and the identifies exchange value as the very expropriation of Situationistsʼ notion of détournement, are repositioned experience itself. in de Certeau as expressly practices of semiosis. The However, in Vanegeim and the SI this defence of utopian identification between a theory of semiosis and ʻlived immediacyʼ is at a precipitous cost. The valoriz- the power of the proletariat to dissolve the effects of ation of the link between ʻlived immediacyʼ and the reification is denied or suspended; the critique of the critique of exchange value produces a premature dis- everyday is now held within the symbolic spaces of

26 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) capitalism, in a kind of a constant war of attrition with remainder through a kind of uncompromising reversal the effects of exchange value. In this way, the dissident of the strictures of the and structural- or subversive interpretation or use of popular forms and ism. This brings into focus an alignment within the practices becomes a kind of poesis, or ʻrewritingʼ of new cultural studies between the new history ʻfrom the dominant culture. As such, his work can be seen as belowʼ and the counter-narrativization of everyday an attempt to put in place a modified subject of cultural experience. Telling stories of being-in-the-world is resistance: by disengaging the concept of the everyday one of the ways in which the working class and from both the determinism of the Frankfurt School dominated are held to analyse the conflicts between and the voluntarism of the Situationists, a politicized the reproduction of everyday life as custom and habit semiotics is attached to issues of self-representation, and the reproduction of alienated social relations as oral history and culture ʻfrom belowʼ. The result is a a whole – for instance, the work done in the 1970s sophisticated version of what, by the mid-1970s, was on the cultures of resistance in Nazi Germany.51 The to become an expanded definition of the concept of customs of everyday life sustain an immanent critique resistance for the new cultural studies: the critique of the world, locating knowledge in the analogical, of the everyday as a disruption and recoding of the rather in the objective operations of science. But for de signifying systems of bourgeois culture. Certeau the emancipatory function of this storytelling Appropriation and reuse of the meanings of the is never identified with anything other than a local and dominating, the poaching of the forms and meanings symbolic challenge to social power. The conditions of of the powerful, the insinuation of the voice of the transmission and reception of a critical oral tradition ʻotherʼ into the reading of the bourgeois text, are the are rendered ideologically unconstrained. If the activ- inevitable daily forms which resistance and creativity ity of the cultural critic is mistaken for the critical take under class society, lending ʻa political dimension activity of the consumer in theories of the creative to everyday practicesʼ,50 such as walking, reading, consumer, the social function of ʻstorytellingʼ from decorating, cooking. For example, in a take on the below is mistaken for the work of emancipation itself. Situationistsʼ Surrealist flanêur, de Certeauʼs ʻcreativeʼ This marks what was to become the fundamental crisis walker is able to situate the experience of the city in of a hermeneutics of the everyday as it mutates into a narrative that replaces the façades and forms of the cultural studies in the mid-1970s: with the widespread urban environment as a source of mute power and turn to a redemptive model of ideology, the critique of social control with a secondary poetic, social geog- the everyday was now identifiable with self-representa- raphy; he or she is able to ʻrewriteʼ the oppressive tion and the free creativity of the enunciating subject, details of their surfaces. In the enactment of fantasy setting in place the generalized inflation of cultural and autobiographical storytelling, walking and day- questions as a way of thinking about social power. dreaming recover the non-proper content of places. By the mid-1970s it is possible to trace through this The triumph of the ‘irreducible remainder’ dissolution of collective politics into cultural politics From this perspective, it is possible to divide our an exact reversal of Lukácsʼs de-differentiated, reified history into four main categories: (1) theories of the subject: the activated subject of resistance is now seen everyday which claim to produce a subject without as in creative and open negotiation with the conditions remainder (Heidegger); (2) theories of the everyday of his or her own alienation. ʻStorytellingʼ becomes a which produce a messianic subject (Lukács, Vaneigem, kind of semiotic emancipation from the brute everyday. Debord); (3) theories of the everyday which produce The critical postwar transformation of a hermeneutics a subject as the embodiment of social contradictions of the everyday out of the philosophy of praxis coex- (Gramsci, Benjamin, Lefebvre); and (4) theories ists in de Certeau with the wider depoliticization of which produce a subject whose agency is identified the alliance between the critique of the everyday and with symbolic displacement or recoding (Barthes, de a microscopic politics of desire in post-ʼ68 French Certeau). The last three categories can, in turn, be culture. Politics is parcelled out to multifarious cultural split between a concept of the subject in atomized acts of resistance; a politics of feints, dodges and ludic resistance, but collectivized momentarily at points of subversion. social crisis (Vaneigem, Debord, de Certeau), and a Nevertheless de Certeauʼs work on consumption concept of the subject as part of a shifting collective as enunciation, and cultural production as everyday of counter-hegemonic alliances (Gramsci, Lefebvre). practice, is instructive in one important respect: it By the mid-1970s, the ʻreinventionʼ of the everyday had ups the ante on the codification of the everyday as come to define itself in relation to the latter, divesting

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 27 itself of its avant-garde temporality. The spatial and of cultural democracy itself. Under the simultaneous temporal dimensions of the critique of the everyday expansion of the meanings of culture, and the critical had contracted ontologically at the same time as they de-massification of mass culture, the critique of the had expanded epistemologically. The dialectical mix everyday is assimilated to the pleasures of capital- of the messianic, anti-representational and historical ist everydayness, incorporating the meanings of the content of the everyday noted in Benjamin was now dominated as popular pleasures into a new consumerist dissolved. counterculture. But if this strengthens the necessary There has been a fundamental transformation of link between the democratization of representation the democratic content of the concept of the everyday and collective struggle ʻfrom belowʼ, it also weakens in the twentieth century. Under its revolutionary emer- the link between democratization and cultural produc- gence the conceptʼs demotic identity was integral to tion. De Certeauʼs The Practice of Everyday Life is the demands and expectations of revolutionary change paradigmatic in this respect, in that it contributes to and working-class agency. The arrival to power of the postmodern incorporation of the everyday as a site a subaltern consciousness of the everyday into the of complex and differentiated social agency and sub- experience of a shared, common culture was to enact jectivity into the ʻpolitics of representationʼ separate the promise of the dehierarchization and democratiz- from any structural engagement with the problems of ation of capitalist production and social relations. In material distribution and economic justice. short, to identify and defend the everyday was to see If moments of autonomy and signs of dissent can it as a space where praxis and reason were united. be discerned in all forms of so-called mass culture, In the post-Bolshevik period of the early formation and popular cultures function as sites of resistance, of cultural studies in postwar France, the memory of the dehierarchizing function of the everyday loses its this revolutionary elision between praxis and reason is former negative political leverage. The notion of the transformed into a process of cultural democratization ʻirreducible remainderʼ no longer signifies a utopian internal to the new conditions of mass culture. The trace or space for practices of another rationality – as everyday became the signifier of socialist democratiz- in Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre and the Situationists ation through cultural change. To defend the everyday – but a confirmation of the creative powers of the as the space of democratic transformation was to give consumer and the superior democracy of community value to those things and experiences ʻfrom belowʼ politics. In this way, the democratic content of the that state modernization, bourgeois high culture and everyday has become overly identified with the cele- the abstractions of the market occluded. Hence the bration of popular representations. As such, after increasing identification between the everyday and the almost three decades of cultural studies the concept notion of the symbolic remainder, and, in the widest of the everyday is now also the site of the repression sense, the importance of the aesthetics of montage. of its own post-capitalist and ʻanti-artʼ history. For In the third – post-Situationist – period, this fledgling if the new differentiated social subject expands the connection between the everyday and the symbolic ʻeverydayʼ, it does so at the expense of its historical others of capitalist repression and modernist abstrac- and critical relationship to its non-contemporaneous tion became a systematic theory of the non-identitary temporalities. and multiple subjectivity. To defend the everyday is to As Arvatov, Lefebvre and the Situationists under- seek and reclaim the cultural autonomy of the subaltern stood, the critique of the everyday is also driven by the subject; the everyday is the site of the ʻvoicelessʼ. promise of its own demise. Yet for all the conceptʼs From this point on, an unprecedented reversal takes contemporary dehistoricization, the tropological con- over: at the same time as the conditions of capital- tent which the ʻeverydayʼ possesses has extraordinary ist monopolization deepen the uniformity of daily powers of invocation. When one tries to imagine experience, in the new cultural theory the everyday a genealogy of synonyms of the concept, such as as the site of symbolic remainder becomes a hugely the ʻordinaryʼ or the ʻdailyʼ, they donʼt possess the expanded site of interpretative freedom, cultural activ- same depth and powers of abstraction. This is because ity and popular pleasures. Not only does mass culture the critique of the everyday is never just a form of become a site of contestation through its non-passive anthropology or ethnography. Rather, it exists as a consumption, but popular counter-cultures become utopian and culturally discontinuous space through sites of political resistance, education and autonomy. which the struggles over social agency are fought out. But what this produces, paradoxically, is the increasing This is why we should derive its meanings from the dissolution of the content of the everyday as a signifier constellation of competing political temporalities and

28 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) spatialities from which its has emerged, despite its trie und des Alltags lebens trittʼ, Nachträge: Gesammelte current absorption into a philosophically diminished Schriften, Band V11.2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1989, p. 886. cultural studies. 25. Walter Benjamin, ʻMoscowʼ, in One Way Street and Other Writings, Books, London, 1979, p. Notes 189. Thanks to Peter Osborne and Esther Leslie for their 26. Boris Arvatov, Kunst und Produktion, Carl Hanser Ver- comments. lag, Munich, 1972. 1. See, for example, the work of Kristin Ross: ʻFrench 27. Ibid., p. 9. Quotidianʼ in Lynn Gumpert, ed., The Art of the Every- 28. Ibid., p. 10. day: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, New 29. Ibid., pp. 27, 33, 35, 36. York University Press, New York, 1997; and Fast Cars, 30. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 9. Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of 31. Walter Benjamin, ʻThe Work of Art in the Age of Me- French Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995. chanical Reproductionʼ, in Illuminations, Fontana, Lon- 2. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Merlin Press, don, 1973, p. 237. London 1971. 32. For a discussion of this issue, see Peter Osborne, ʻSmall- 3. Freudʼs The Interpretation of Dreams was published in scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjaminʼs 1900, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. As Politics of Timeʼ, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Freud was to say in 1890 in ʻPsychical (or Mental) Treat- Osborne, eds, Walter Benjaminʼs Philosophy: Destruc- mentʼ, ʻWords are the essential tool of mental treatment tion and Experience, Routledge, London, 1994, ch. 3. … for the words which we use in our everyday speech 33. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature are nothing other than watered-down magicʼ (The Stand- of Human Freedom (1809), Open Court, La Salle IL, ard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 1986, p. 34. 11, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 34. Ibid., p. 34. London, 1953–74, p. 283). 35. , ʻLa Mystification: Notes pour une cri- 4. Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life, and Other tique de la vie quotidienneʼ, Avant-Poste, no. 2, August Writings on Culture and Science, Pathfinder Press, New 1933. York, 1973. 36. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Verso, 5. Trotsky, ʻHow to Beginʼ, in ibid., p. 70. London, 1991. 6. Alexandra Kollantai, ʻMarriage and Everyday Lifeʼ, in 37. For an analysis of postwar French modernization and Alexandra Kollantai: Selected Writings, translated, intro- the ʻeverydayʼ, see Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. duced and commentaries by Alix Holt, Allison & Busby, 38. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, London, 1977. 1957, p. 9. 7. See John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, 39. Maurice Blanchot, LʼEntrantratien infini, Gallimard, Photography and the Everyday, Manchester University Paris, 1959. The section on Lefebvre and the everyday Press, Manchester, 1998, chs 2 and 3. was translated as ʻEveryday Speechʼ, in Yale French 8. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, New Left Books, Studies, no. 73, 1987. London, 1970. 40. Ibid., p. 13. 9. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Stud- 41. Ibid., p. 15. ies in Marxist Dialectics, Merlin Press, London, 1971. 42. LʼInternationale Situationniste: 1958–69, Van Gennep, 10. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Amsterdam, 1970. Thought, New Left Books, London, 1970. 43. , La Sociétié du Spectacle, Buchet-Chastel, 11. Ibid., p. 13. Paris, 1967; English translation, The Society of the Spec- 12. Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, p. 5. tacle, Black and Red, Detroit, 1977. 13. Ibid, p. 64. 44. ʻThe Transformation of Everyday Lifeʼ, IS no. 6, 1961; 14. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 15–16. reprinted in Christopher Gray, ed., Leaving the 20th 15. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, Jonathan Cape, Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist Inter- London, 1968, p. 100. national, Free Fall Publications, London, 1974. 16. Ibid., p. 102. 45. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Press, Left 17. Ibid., p. 128. Bank Books and Rebel Press, London, 1983. 18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. 46. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Human Freedom, p. 80. Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971, p. 331. 47. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 151. 19. Ibid., p. 326. 48. Ibid., p. 45. 20. Ibid., p. 421. 49. Michel de Certeau, LʼInvention du quotidien: Arts de 21. Ibid., p. 424. faire, Gallimard, Paris, 1974; English translation, The 22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Basil Blackwell, Practice of Everyday Life, University of California, Ber- Oxford, 1962, pp. 138–48. keley, 1984. 23. Walter Benjamin, Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge: Gesam- 50. Ibid., p. xvii. melte Schriften Band 11.3, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1977, 51. See, for instance, Detlev J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Ger- p. 1138. many: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday 24. Walter Benjamin, ʻIn der UdSSR die Kunst in der Indus- Life, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1980.

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 29