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Philosophizing the Everyday the Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies

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Philosophizing the Everyday the Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies 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 Marxism 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 gender. 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
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