Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory

by John Roberts

Overview

After modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, the everyday supposedly is where a democracy of taste is brought into being - the place where art goes to recover its customary and collective pleasures, and where the shared pleasures of popular culture are indulged, from celebrity magazines to shopping malls.

John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Bringing radical political theory back to the centre of the discussion, he shows how notions of cultural democratization have been oversimplified. Asserting that the everyday should not be narrowly identified with the popular, Roberts critiques the way in which the concept is now overly associated with consumption and 'ordinariness'.

Engaging with the work of key thinkers including, Lukács, Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Barthes, Vaneigem, and de Certeau, Roberts shows how the concept of the everyday continues to be central to debates on ideology, revolution and praxis. He offers a lucid account of different approaches that developed over the course of the twentieth century, making this an ideal book for anyone looking for a politicised approach to cultural theory.

John Roberts is a Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1997) and The Philistine Controversy (Verso, with Dave Beech, 2002), plus other books and numerous articles, in Radical Philosophy and elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745324104
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	04/26/2006
Series:	Marxism and Culture
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of a number of books, including The Intangibilities of Form (Verso, 2007), Philosophising the Everyday (Pluto, 2006) and Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2016). He edited the English translation of Boris Arvatov's classic Art and Production (Pluto, 2017).

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CHAPTER 1

The Everyday and the Philosophy of Praxis

It is only through the habit of everyday life that we come to think it perfectly plain and commonplace that a social relation should take on the form of a thing, so that the relation of persons in their work appears in the form of a mutual relation between things, and between things and persons.

Karl Marx

After the Russian Revolution, the ontological marriage between 'everyday life' (Alltag lebens) and 'inauthentic' experience – with all its affectations of late Romantic ennui – was subject to a massive cultural and political haemorrhaging. Where the industrialized everyday was once identified with that which was beneath high cultural attention or held to be bound up with limited notions of experience, it became the source of cultural renewal and political and philosophical scrutiny. This is because, above all else, the Russian Revolution destroyed the authority of the prevailing philosophical dualism of the prewar high culture in which art was forever doomed to find a purposeful cultural role in bourgeois society. The everyday was lifted out of the lebensphilosophic and neo-Romantic view of it as impersonal and mechanical and antithetical to genuine culture. Not all the neo-Romanticism of the prewar European intellengenstia was, of course, uniformly conservative or reactionary in its condescension or dismissal of the 'everyday'. Its construction of cultural value was in part indebted to the artisanal anti-capitalism of its forebears, and as such it adopted a notional understanding of the idea of art as social critique. Indeed, where modernism had made an impact on this intelligentsia it was a modernism of the 'primitive' and the anti-industrial kind which had some influence. But the remnants of this artisanal anti-capitalism were overwhelmingly locked into a celebration of the artwork as the fount of authentic experience. The result was a failure to analyse and mediate artistic form in response to the political and social conditions of the new revolutionary and technical epoch. The rise of the workers' movement, the breakdown of the prewar bourgeois formal hierarchies under the impact of modernism, the 'secularization' of culture with the increasing demotion of religious observance, and the opening up of technology in cultural production, made it impossible for defenders of neo-Romanticism to use modernism in anything but the most limited of ways as a reaction to the alienations of social experience and technology. As a result the neo-Romantic antithesis between the idea of authentic experience as inscribed in the primary judgement of of art, and the inauthenticity of alienated social experience, blocked the possibility of cultural renewal and transformation, as postwar and post-revolutionary European society sought to extricate itself from the violent collapse of bourgeois society.

Martin Heidegger and Georg Lukács were two writers who in their early work were both deeply immersed in this view of the artwork in pre-war culture, just as at the same time they both shared in a revulsion against it after the war. But, if both writers in the early 1920s took their distance from the aesthetic privations of neo-Romantic anti-capitalism (Heiddeger taking seriously Lukács' critique of the pathologies of capitalist culture), unlike Lukács, it is Heidegger who has no place for the everyday in his critical refounding of the relationship between culture and modern technology. Indeed, even if the aesthetic judgement of the artwork no longer offers a space of cultural critique and subjective autonomy, the everyday remains fundamentally inauthentic. Lukács, however, reinvents himself in the wake of the Russian Revolution by embracing the critical immanence of everyday life. In this he identifies the limits of his early writing and the prewar artisanal anti-capitalism precisely in relation to this question of cultural dualism. In an auto-critique of his own Lebensphilosophie tendencies in Soul and Form (1910) in his post-1918 writing, he stresses the fact that the historical blockage of prewar neo-Romanticism lies in its inability to assimilate the critique of the everyday into the relations of production of art, thereby failing to transform the cultural role of art's relationship to the everyday within bourgeois society. Accordingly, for Lukács it is only with Marxism and the historically unprecedented cultural praxis of the Russian Revolution that the breakdown of this dualism will be secured and the struggle for culture realized – what he had called, in a mournful tone in Soul and Form, the restless longing of man to 'make the pinnacle of his existence the plane on which he lives his life, to make its meaning part of everyday reality'.

Lukács writing on revolutionary praxis and culture – which I will discuss in detail later in this chapter – is representative of what we might call the post-revolutionary securalization of the everyday: that is, the production of culture lies in the reconquest and immanent theorization of alienated, industrialized experience. This is why the breakdown of the dualism between art and cultural agency in the early post-revolutionary period also dovetails with the prewar emergence and postwar institutionalization of Freudian psychoanalysis, the other great 'secularizing' cultural force after the First World War. The grounding of human consciousness in the conflicts and disjunctions of daily life in psychoanalysis present a similar critique of philosophical dualism, but on the basis of the desubjectivization of the subject. The subject is recognized as the outcome of a given (and shifting) psychic history. That is, the subject's symptoms and the 'psychic disturbances of daily life'7 are studied in relation to their discursive history and context. This brings the immanent critique of experience in Freud into a comparable position to that of the revolutionary securalization of the everyday: alienated experience becomes meaningful and purposeful experience. However, this is not to say that this denaturalization of the everyday in Freudian psychoanalysis and the denaturalization of the everyday in revolutionary Soviet cultural praxis (and early Lukács) are the same thing. Indeed, they follow very different paths culturally; and, certainly, by the late 1920s the Revolution was beginning to destroy what shared theoretical perspectives they did possess. But, nevertheless, in the early 1920s for a brief period psychoanalysis and revolutionary cultural praxis converge on a shared terrain: the disinvestment of cultural theory and the human sciences from the metaphysics of tragedy.

In this respect the notion of the inauthenticity or repetition of everyday experience (as in Heidegger's notion of Wiederholung) undergoes two major transformations in understanding in the light of psychoanalysis and revolutionary cultural praxis in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Firstly, the radical substitution of the interpretation of everyday speech for neurological diagnosis in the treatment and understanding of the perturbations of psychic life and illness requires the physician actively to listen to the experiences of the patient thereby opening up a space for a hermeneutics of the everyday – out of silence and incoherence emerges an attentiveness to what remains hidden or partially disclosed or seemingly meaningless; and, secondly, for the first time in human history the Bolshevik seizure of power is able to break the link between the collective experience of the dominated and religious and cultural fatalism, thereby allying social transformation with cultural transformation 'from below'. Thus if the denaturalization of psychoanalysis and revolutionary cultural praxis are two quite separate moments of critique with very different origins, they, nevertheless, share a similar exit from the backward-looking forms of prewar Lebensphilosophie, that is, they both insist on the relationality of meaning in the face of the abstractions of 'spirit' and the call to authenticity. This is why one should not underestimate the utopian content of the Russian embrace of the everyday as a cultural and social category; from 1917 the 'everyday' (byt) in Soviet culture is subject to an extraordinary theoretical elaboration and scrutiny that largely shapes the content of the concept through the twentieth century, pulling other uses of the 'everyday' towards it. What once was thought of as empty, featureless and repetitive, is now the source of extended collective engagement, intervention and transformation. Indeed, the very connotations of byt – in Russian it signifies something hard, intractable, something that presses down relentlessly on the senses – become a material and moral virtue, the imposing and necessary industrial matter that needs to be moulded and rebuilt.

The Everyday and the Machino-technical

One of the highpoints of this theoretical elaboration of byt is Trotsky's writing from the early 1920s in Pravda, first collected in English under the title of Problems of Life in 1924 (and republished as The Problems of Everyday Life in 1973). In this collection, and other writings up until his exile in 1928, Trotsky returns again and again to the everyday as the focus of the achievements of the Revolution and the site where the Revolution is to be defended and deepened. As the focus of the working class's cultural and spiritual development the 'everyday' is where the revolution is to be made and remade in accordance with the new conditions of socialist construction: 'The older generation, which is more and more diminishing, learned communism in the course of a class struggle; but the new generation is destined to learn it in the elements of construction, the elements of construction of everyday life.'

Here Trotsky is following Lenin's directive to the Party to shift its energies after the consolidation of power from political work to cultural work, or rather, to the transformation of political work into cultural work. 'Leninism is the knowledge and ability to turn culture, i.e. all the knowledge amassed in previous centuries, to the interests of the working masses.' In this way the Revolution, Trotsky declares, unleashes a new kind of politics in which all aspects of social and cultural life are subject to evaluation and transformation. Politics are now the mediating form between the collective self-activity of the proletariat and the new cultural forms of everyday life.

The object of acquiring conscious knowledge of everyday life is precisely so as to be able to dissolve graphically, concretely, and cogently before the eyes of the working masses themselves the contradictions between the outgrown material shell of the old way of life and the new relationships and needs which have arisen.

Indeed, the disclosure of the contradictions of everyday life as the basis for new cultural forms and relations is at the very heart of what 'distinguished Marx's method'.

Also exemplary of this shift of political work into cultural work in the early 1920s were Alexandra Kollantai's writings on gender, sexuality and marriage (even if the 'gendering of the everyday' was largely absent from the theorization of the concept until Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Lefebvre's work on femininity in the 1960s). Kollantai's commitment to sexual equality and sexual liberation in a period of extraordinary ignorance and reticence on sexual questions within the workers' movement, and within the Bolshevik party in particular, directed women to the possibility of new kinds of social relationships with men and, therefore, to the transformation of the categories of everyday experience. As Trotsky himself argued in alliance with Kollantai, 'The central task in the transformation of everyday life is the liberation of women.'

But, if the transformation of the everyday provided an expanded cultural space through which the revolution saw itself, this cultural space was nevertheless overdetermined by a strongly unified sense of what these modernizing conditions in the transformation of experience might actually be. The Bolshevik critique and transformation of the everyday was not an aesthetic critique of capital and political economy, it was a technical and technist transformation of pre-capitalist forms as the demand for industrialization, at Party level, overwhelmed any prospective or experimental link between the emancipation of labour, gender relations and aesthetic discourse. In this all aspects of the transformation of everyday life – the critique of bourgeois high culture, artisanal cultural practices, religion, prevailing gender relations – were officially mediated through this industrial, modernizing imperative and machino-technical culture. In Kollantai, for instance, underlying her call for sexual liberation at certain points is an almost brutal commitment to the free availability of women's bodies, as if pleasure itself had to be subject to quantifiable levels of sexual promiscuity in order for the boundaries of bourgeois morality to dissolve. As such, Lenin's, Trotsky's and Kollantai's cultural politics are far from being free of the instrumental directives of what many leading Bolsheviks cited approvingly as the Americanization or Taylorization of the Revolution. Indeed, although Lenin and Trotsky diverge on what the politicization of culture might entail under this imperative – Trotsky and Kollantai being far more sympathetic to modernism – they were perhaps its most vocal defenders. Lenin sees the first responsibility of the politicization of culture as the development of class consciousness and identity through the discipline of industrial labour. He is largely indifferent, therefore, in fact antagonistic, to any arguments that would weaken the refoundation of industrial production and the emergence of the Soviet Union from its pre-capitalist sloth. This is why, although Lenin did not support many of the extreme proletarian manifestations of this machino-technical culture, he nevertheless shared in its ruling spirit. Trotsky's cultural politics in Problems of Everyday Life, likewise, are shaped predominantly by the machino-technical imperative. The aim of revolutionaries, he argues, should not be to smash Fordism, but to socialize and purge it. Such willing technism generates a tension in his writing on the everyday that is replicated in much of the leadership: between the Leninist insistence on the proletariat as the revolutionary inheritors and guardians of the highest achievements of bourgeois culture (against ultra-leftist Proletkult nihilism) and the requirements of modernization and the formation of a new culture.

It is no surprise, therefore, that in the early years of the Revolution the writings of the American Frederick Taylor and his Soviet epigone Alexei Gastev were welcomed onto the Central Committee in the name of the rationalization of labour. Gastev was the director of the Institute for the Scientific Organization of the Mechanization of Man, which devoted itself to identifying and refining the machino-technical and temporal demands of the revolution. In this, Gastev and the Institute were preoccupied with two major issues in relation to the proletarian reconstruction of the everyday: the quality of work discipline itself – the Institute employed various time-keepers to monitor worker attendance and performance – and a science of 'revolutionary efficiency and economy' in which human movement and manual skills were measured and defined by the machinic, in order to divest the body of the worker from the bad habits of bourgeois indulgence and lassitude. One of Gastev's favourite exhortations to workers was to go to bed and get up at a fixed hour in order that they might aim at 'objective hygiene of cerebral activity'. One of his favourite maxims was 'Unremitting struggle, mastery of the body'. This rhetoric was easily open to ridicule and Gastev's obsessive mensuration of the revolutionary body soon fell out of favour, as its palpable anti-humanist technism came into conflict with Lenin's Marxist humanist cultural inclinations; and later, with the conservative restitution of traditional cultural forms under Stalinism.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface
Prologue: Dangerous Memories
1: The Everyday and the Philosophy of Praxis
2: The Everyday as Trace and Remainder
3: Lefebvre's Dialectical Irony: Marx and the Everyday
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index