Philosophizing the Everyday

Summary & notes for the book Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory by John Roberts. Published in 2006 by Pluto Press.

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Prologue

Roberts begins with a sceptical view of the ‘everyday’ as it is deployed in contemporary discourse (art, design, architecture, fashion, etc). After the modern/postmodern turn, art has moved to the ‘everyday’ not as a utopian prospect but instead as “a meta-signifier of social and cultural inclusivity [as well as…] each discipline’s interdisciplinarity” . His text is then an attempt to overturn this conceptualisation of the ‘everyday’ as a ‘theory of consumption’ or ‘ordinariness’ and “reinstate the philosophical and political partisanship of the concept” (Roberts, 2006, page 1-2).

He aims to do this by mapping out the pre-WWII debates on the everyday, evaluating the concept as ‘a basis for a critique of culture’ as such. There are four strands to these debates:

1. The Leninist extension of politics into cultural politics during and after the Russian Revolution (Trotsky’s cultural activism; Soviet Productivism and Constructivism);
2. The transformation of European Marxism into a philosophy of praxis out of Marx’s critique of traditional materialism and the return to Hegel and the philosophy of consciousness (Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Lefebvre);
3. Freud’s demedicalization of mental disorders and illness;
4. The emergence of the new avant-garde documentary art and literature.

What unites these strands is an “extraordinary attentiveness to the political form and significance of cultural activity and change”. They address this not as a “‘politicization’ or instrumentalization of the content of art” [^1. Benjamin] but instead as a means of exploring the ‘alliance’ of culture and politics, the manner in which “the revolutionary transformation of the everyday presupposes the radical transformation of the content of social and cultural experience itself…” The everday is thus conceptualised at the interstices in which “art, aesthetic experience and labour” come into relation with one another and that might therefore be rethought “in the interests of, and as part of, proletarian emancipation and the democratization of cultural production.” This therefore poses a challenge to the ‘segregation of politics from culture’; the ‘categories of art and labour’; and ‘traditional accounts of aesthetic experience’. (Roberts, 2006, page 4)

In his own words, Roberts’ account is then antithetical to prevailing ideas of the ‘everyday’ in contemporary cultural studies; seeking to reintegrate an understanding of ‘cultural production and consumption’ and defend the possibility of “cultural theory as a revolutionary critique of the social totality”. For this reason, his critique focuses on the ~50 years between 1917 and 1975; the ‘semiotic turn’ found in the work of De Certeau and others (from 1974 onwards) who reoriented “the debate away from a general theory of cultural production to the productive consumer” (Roberts, 2006, page 5). There are then 3 key time-lines which track the rise and fall of the theory of the everyday between 1917 and ‘75:

1. The Russian Revolution which “shattered the class-exclusions and genteel aestheticisms of the old bourgeois culture and academy across Europe and North America between 1917 and 1939.”
2. The post-war anti-Fascist Liberation in 1945 – in France and Italy – “which unleashed a popular and intellectual dissent from the official forms of political restitution associated with the old prewar bourgeois ruling parties and culture.”
3. The modernist counter-culture of 1966–1974 (most evident in ‘68) which, “although detached from the earlier avant-garde forms of the ‘everyday’ continued the revolutionary critique of high culture and political economy.”

These movements and counter-cultural practices are unifiable to the extent that they “[decoupled] cultural production from bourgeois institutions” (with varying degrees of success) and established links between culture and extra-cultural (democratizing/democratic) forces ‘from below’ in “deprivatized and collective forms”.

“This was a period of cultural groups and artist collectives, free associations and free exchanges – particularly between artists and non-artists.” (Roberts, 2006, page 8)

After 1974 we see the reassertion of the capitalist state against this period of counter-cultural resistance, “stripping the public realm of [its] public content…” and commodifying access to culture. This ‘restitution’ was spurred not by the ‘counter-hegemonic content’ of such groups however, but as a result of increased labour militancy between 1966 and 1974 (“as well as the socialized and non-market spaces and cultural interests attached to such militancy”). This form of ‘reprivatisation’ attempted to restore levels of profit and reclaim the ‘social hegemony of the bourgeoisie’ in part by creating “a culture of dissociation between art, labour and counter-cultural form.” (Roberts, 2006, page 9)

“One of the outcomes of the dissociation between art and counter-cultural form for artists was the generalized subordination of cultural praxis to aesthetic discourse.” (Roberts, 2006, p. 15)

Roberts’ book is then a reassertion of the importance of the originary theoretical texts (Lefebvre in particular) and critical practices that formed the ‘everyday’ as a concept; asking, in a sense, what was lost after 1975 and what it is that we ‘cannot do without’ from this earlier period. This is productive not only for a critical re-evaluation of the concept but also uses it as a “singularly valuable [tool] in mapping the philosophical and political legacy of revolutionary politics” itself (Roberts, 2006, page 11):

“Its theorization as a concept, as such, remains incontestably tied to the revolutionary content of its own early history: the insistence on the indivisible link between the critique of the capitalist value-form and the possibility of radically new cultural forms” (Roberts, 2006, page 13-14).

The Everyday and the Philosophy of Praxis

The Russian Revolution is decisive in severing – or indeed, reversing – the “ontological marriage between ‘everyday life’ (Alltag lebens) and ‘inauthentic’ experience”:

“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.” (Roberts, 2006, page 16)

This is an example of what Roberts calls, the ‘post-revolutionary securalization of the everyday’, the idea that “the production of culture lies in the reconquest and immanent theorization of alienated, industrialized experience”  or, more straightforwardly, the “breakdown of the dualism between art and cultural agency” (Roberts, 2006, page 18). This is evident:

1. A theoretical pivot away (found in Lukács) from neo-Romantic ideas of authentic experience (as ‘inscribed in the judgement of art’) towards a recognition of the ‘critical immanence’ of everyday life.
2. The ‘desubjectivization’ of the subject found in the emergence and institutionalisation of Freudian psychoanalysis. In recognizing symptoms as ‘psychic distrubances in daily life’, “alienated experience becomes meaningful and purposeful experience” (Roberts, 2006, page 18-19).

Two major transformations then follow in our understanding of the authenticity/inauthenticity of everyday experience:

1. A ‘hermeneutics of the everyday’ is developed in the (psychoanalytic) elevation of ‘everyday speech’. One must listen to a patients experience in order to understand and diagnose them.
2. The Bolsheviks break the fatalistic link between collective experience and religion/culture: “thereby allying social transformation with cultural transformation ‘from below’” (Roberts, 2006, page 19).

In almost utopian fashion, byt (everyday life), is transformed from that which is ‘thought of as empty, featureless and repetitive’ into the ‘source of extended collective engagement, intervention and transformation’ (Roberts, 2006, page 20).

This is precisely the point made by Lenin (and Trotsky after him) that the ‘consolidation of power’ depends on the ability to transform political work into cultural work, mediating ‘all aspects of social and cultural life’ through political ‘evaluation and transformation’ (Roberts, 2006, page 21).

However, in the Bolshevik case, such mediation occurs not through an ‘aesthetic critique of capital and political economy’ (as in emancipatory discourses of labour, gender, etc?) but rather a ‘technical and technist transformation of pre-capitalist forms as the demand for industrialization’. What Roberts calls the ‘machino-technical imperative’ (Roberts, 2006, page 22-23).

This overdetermination of the everyday through such a machino-technical imperative is evident in the ‘Revolution’s submission to Taylorism’ which at once operates as the dynamic base from which the Revolution sprang, and also serves as its ‘future social negation’. (Roberts, 2006, page 24).

The avant-garde (Constructivist and Productivist artists and theorists) are useful in this, as they are able to question, more open-endedly, the relation between emancipation and the machino-technical; i.e. what cultural form might the emancipation of labour take? or “in what ways is the emancipation of labour from capitalist relations of production actually compatible with the machino-technical?” (Roberts, 2006, page 25).

The avant-gardes help conceptualise ‘the defining terrain of the concept of the everyday’ through their “participation in production as the basis for the transformation of the identity of both workers and artists, and the de-alienation of art and labour…”; the (contiguous) movement from Bolshevik ‘machino-technics’ to ‘senuous liberation’ from/through productive labour. (Roberts, 2006, page 25-27).

This shift from ‘revolutionary politics’ to ‘revolutionary cultural politics’ arrives at a profound historical juncture, ‘transforming the tenets of orthodox Marxism’ in C19/20th Europe which, in its evolutionary (non-revolutionary), positivist, scientistic and economistic outlook, was effectively anti-cultural. In the work of Benjamin and others the concept of the ‘everyday’ (understood as a ‘category of revolutionary cultural transformation’) therefore opens up a “means of uncoupling Marxism from […] mechanistic social categories of orthodoxy…” (Roberts, 2006, page 27-28).

“[During this period] the everyday signifies something like a generalized point of attraction for the critique of prewar Marxist orthodoxy and bourgeois science. […] Where we find reference to the everyday, we usually find a philosophical discussion of revolutionary agency [or revolutionary praxis]” (Roberts, 2006, page 29).

Revolutionary praxis here is understood, after Marx, as a ‘unity of external, material transformation and self-transformation’: “Both subject and object are transformed in a continuous and mutually determining process” [^3 Ranciere, singing unity] . Discussions of the everyday (in the 1920’s) therefore open up onto the “the phenomenological basis of revolutionary practice”, advocating explicitly for a connection to be (re-)established between “political struggles and the problems of cultural mediation and transformation” (against the orthodoxy of the Second International) through a political reorientation towards the conjunctural and the particular (Roberts, 2006, page 29-31).

A return to German idealism, and questions of the philosophy of consciousness (via Korsch), then becomes a means of defending Marx’s “commitment to questions of social agency, class consciousness and cultural activism” as a qualification for his “discovery of the quantifiable tendencies of capitalism”:

“…after 1917 Marxism faces a clear choice: between its collapse into a positive science, and a return to the dialectic philosophy of Hegel.” (Roberts, 2006, page 33)

Lukács’ contribution lies here, in taking Hegel’s notion of ‘self-knowledge’ as that which ‘shapes and directs human emancipation’ and integrating it into class analysis: the bourgeoisie are constrained by processes of reification (which conceal self-estrangement and dehumanization through the convergence of ‘subjective experience and objective social and economic forces’); the proletariat, on the other hand, achieves self-knowledge through work, “as a commodity through [their] labour, his or her knowledge becomes practical and active” (Roberts, 2006, page 34) . For Lukács then ‘revolutionary praxis’ is then a question of ‘revolutionary self-knowledge’:

“The everyday is neither ‘inauthentic’ nor ‘authentic’, but rather, the temporal and spatial order out of which the alienations of proletarian self-knowledge will emerge.” (Roberts, 2006, page 35).

There is however a contradiction, for Roberts, in Lukács’ analysis: the way in which material change is mediated (in a concrete sense) separately from ‘the forms and modalities of everyday (cultural) practice’. The everyday is elided in favour of the (somewhat abstract) Party as the ‘only concrete and practical’ form of mediation. (Roberts, 2006, page 36).

Lefebvre identifies this issue with Lukács’ all-too speculative concept of a ‘total’ class-consciousness, arguing that “no such historical consciousness is to be found in the working class anywhere in the world today” – he insists, in other words, on “the concrete, contradictory and everyday conditions of mediation.” (Roberts, 2006, page 37-38) Going further, Lefebvre identifies alienation not as the ‘inescapable condition’ which revolutionary consciousness overcomes (or emerges out of), “but the productive and conflictual force of this consciousness” – ‘critical thinking and action’ must, in fact, begin with the reproductive everyday habits and customs of workers. (Roberts, 2006, page 38)

This conception of ‘alienation as a productive category’ opens up a ‘critical hermeneutics of the everyday’ – seeking to learn from culture, rather than merely assimilate it into theory. The philosophy of praxis might then be understood (for Lefebrvre) as the convergence of Marxism as a critique of the commodity form and as its ‘possible cultural hermeneutics’ (Roberts, 2006, page 39-40)