marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everydayfriedrich engels, then stretches to georg...

Marxism and the convergenceof utopia and the everyday

MICHAEL E. GARDINER

ABSTRACT

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday lifeand utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is acomplex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace someof the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to theirconvergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition),in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences andsemantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates inthe work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to GeorgLukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (asmediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminatingmost recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory isinseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critiquewhat it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities ofdaily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but alsoattempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsameterrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everydayutopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modesof thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they presentto us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between theeveryday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that hasbedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions.

Key words defamiliarization, everyday life, Marxism,modernity, phenomenology, utopia

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 19 No. 3© 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 1–32[19:3; 1–32; DOI: 10.1177/0952695106066539]

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INTRODUCTION

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life andutopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex andoften ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoreticalfiliations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemmingmainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of themore significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theoriza-tion. This lineage originates, logically enough, in the work of Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘GnosticMarxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of GeorgSimmel, who could in many respects be described as a ‘para-Marxist’, at leastin methodological and analytical terms), and culminating most recently in thework of Agnes Heller.1 Such an approach is characterized by certain distinc-tive preoccupations. First, any discussion of ‘everyday life’, in the context ofa non-economistic, critical and reflexive Marxism, is inseparable from aproject that seeks to unveil and criticize what it takes to be the debased,routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices ofmodern capitalist society. Part and parcel of the latter is the desire to locatecertain utopian or emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain. Thisorientation can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. By‘everyday utopianism’, I mean a theoretical position that imagines utopia notas an ideal society located in some romanticized past ‘Golden Age’, or insome distant imagined and perfected future understood in a ‘blueprint’ or‘social engineering’ sense, but as a series of forces, tendencies and possibili-ties that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of dailyexistence.2

Such an expression might not, at first glance, appear to be an especiallyfelicitous one, in so far as ‘utopia’ and ‘everyday life’ are usually construedas incongruous, even thoroughly incompatible phenomena. Moreover, thesuggestion that this group of sometimes disparate thinkers constitutes a‘tradition’ in the generally accepted sense of the term is open to debate. Incountering these objections, my position is, first, that there does exist astrong and hitherto neglected connection between these two concepts; andsecond, that whatever their ostensive differences, these thinkers have tendedto focus on a series of remarkably similar concerns and issues. Some of thelatter include: (1) the limitations and pitfalls of what we could term ‘abstractutopianism’, and the need to overcome idealist modes of thought more gener-ally; (2) the importance of bringing something resembling ‘lived experience’into closer proximity to our understanding of society and history, and ofutilizing this knowledge for the practical amelioration of current socialconditions, but without falling into the trap of fetishizing the concrete or theimmediate (Ireland, 2002); (3) the notion that genuine human sociality exists

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 19(3)2

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primarily, if not exclusively, outside the formal and repressive structures ofthe capitalist state and private or public bureaucracies; (4) a preoccupationwith such phenomena as the body, desire, sensuality and play, and with therole these might take in any genuinely transformative political project. Forthe theorists discussed here, the ordinary can become extraordinary not byeclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can leap beyond it arbitrarily to some‘higher’ level of cognition, knowledge or action, but by fully appropriatingand activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, withinit. Such an enriched experience can then be redirected back to daily life inorder to transform it. The overarching goal is, in the words of Kaplan andRoss, to elevate ‘lived experience to the status of a critical concept – not merelyin order to describe lived experience, but in order to change it’ (Kaplan andRoss, 1987: 1).

The second thing that must be noted here is that, as a direct result of thisexpressly political stance, each of the major figures of this Central EuropeanMarxist tradition cultivates an ambivalent, and hence expressly dialectical,attitude towards the everyday and the utopian qualities it is felt to embody.Yet, precisely how this ambivalence is registered in the work of any giventhinker varies considerably.3 Further, such a dialectical ambivalence isreflected in a preoccupation with historical transformations vis-à-viseveryday life, especially as this concerns the transition from a premodern tomodern society (the latter of which, as Henri Lefebvre argued, can itself besubdivided into a number of successive, although unevenly developed, stages– which, for some, would shade into the postmodern) (Lefebvre, 1984). Thishistorical perspective involves the task of understanding how capitalisteconomic realities, especially the dominance of the commodity-form and theintersection of work, leisure and domestic life, have shaped day-to-day sociallife. But it is also concerned with the ways in which the culture of modernityand the process of modernization more generally have insinuated themselvesin the everyday, at the same time transforming its utopian potentialities. Thispertains to such phenomena as the secularization and rationalization of thesocial world; the condensation of time and space through emerging tech-nologies of transportation and communications; the demise of relativelystable, premodern identities and the concomitant growth of individualismand social fragmentation; a pervasive urbanization process; and the concen-tration and centralization of political power, institutional structures andcapital, to name only the most salient factors.4 Hence, for the Marxisttradition discussed here, everyday life cannot simply be taken for granted: itmust be ‘problematized’, rendered strange or unfamiliar, in order to grasphow it is mediated by a wide range of sociocultural, political and economicfactors, and also to make visible its latently utopian characteristics. Althoughthere are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work ofthese writers, it can be argued that the key insight they present to us is the

MARXISM, UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY 3

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need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanentand the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work ofmany other theorists and intellectual traditions.5

Perhaps a useful way to bring the notion of ‘everyday utopianism’ intosharper relief with respect to its central elements and hermeneutical possi-bilities, and in a perhaps less abstract way than sketched out above, might beto discuss briefly Joe Moran’s recent article ‘November in Berlin: the End ofthe Everyday’. Here, Moran examines a specific historical conjuncture: thepostwar division of Germany into Eastern and Western sectors, whichinvolved very different models of political organization and economicdevelopment (as filtered by Cold War rivalries and attitudes), culminating inthe physical construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Although these weredeeply traumatic events for the German national psyche, they eventuallybecame absorbed and sedimented into the everyday rhythms and routines oflife in the GDR in particular: ‘Within the context of a daily life that wasgrudgingly accepted as inevitable, the Wall simply became part of the scenery’(Moran, 2004: 218). The momentous political events of November 1989 andsubsequent breaching of the Wall suddenly dissolved such ‘normalizing’ andtypically opaque daily habits and rituals. The smooth, linear continuum ofofficial historical narratives was effectively shattered, the essentially contin-gent openness of the world-historical process was affirmed, and a myriad ofdizzying new possibilities for ‘changing life’ suddenly hove into view.Benumbed by decades of endless queuing for scarce and often non-existentnecessities, unfulfilling work routines, bureaucratic surveillance and thepervasive micro-management and politicization of everyday life, EastBerliners overwhelmed befuddled and suddenly helpless border guards, and,among other carnivalesque happenings, ‘Trabi drivers produced animpromptu, atonal horn concerto, and pedestrians pushed champagnethrough the windows and banged on the roofs. In West Berlin, huge, snakingqueues formed outside the sex shops (banned in the East) and the banks whereOssis lined up to collect their 100DM “welcome money”’ (Moran, 2004: 225).

The fall of the Berlin Wall therefore not only revealed the apparent time-lessless and eternality of the everyday to be a socially and historically contin-gent construction; it was a moment that brought to the fore multiple utopianpossibilities. And, although Moran does not refer to his ideas directly, the‘pregnant pause’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall might be interpreted as anexcellent example of what the German Marxist and theorist of utopia ErnstBloch called the novum (Bloch, 1986: 146).6 By this, Bloch meant the periodicirruption of the radically new into the apparently stable and eternal, and it isthe appearance of the novum, in however fleeting or mystified a fashion, thatcircumvents officialdom’s resistance to change and fuels what he calls the‘principle of hope’. This utopian defamiliarization of a reified and taken-for-granted everyday, that is, helps to generate an awareness of alternative


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possibilities, and hence constitutes a kind of ‘pre-cognition’, an anticipatoryillumination of transformed conditions. Bloch argues that the novum is anexpression of what he refers to as the ‘concrete utopia’, which is marked bya structural isomorphism between the ‘potency of human hope’ and theactual potentialities of change in both the natural and sociohistorical worlds.As Wayne Hudson has cogently written, the concrete utopia is ‘“concrete”because it is present in the now ( Jetzt) of the moment as the still unmediatedpromise of fulfillment, as the content of metaphysical wonder (Staunen). [In]contrast to all “abstract,” “static,” “undialectical” utopias, concrete utopia isa processual utopia, grounded in immanently developing tendencies workingout in the presence of something better’ (Hudson, 1982: 100).

A cynical response to Moran’s account might be that in their apparentsupplication to the cornucopia of consumer delights proffered by the West,East Berliners simply substituted one master (the authoritarian socialist state)for another (capital). Both constantly shape and restructure the everyday inboth obvious and more subtle ways. Moran does point out that not long afterthe events of November 1989, East Berliners settled into newly reconstitutedpatterns of daily life that, in many respects, were just as routinized and resist-ant to radical reflexivity as previous ones. For instance, although the Wallwas dismantled and marked only by a line in the pavement, in the course oftheir daily activities most Berliners were oblivious to this marker, which wasso immediately visible, and so fraught with symbolic weight, to visitors andtourists. But Moran is also keen to underscore the possibility that theresponses of East Berliners cannot be so easily written off as the simplebedazzlement of the stonewashed masses by the consumer plenitude of theWest. Quite apart from the fact that reactions by East Berliners were multi-farious and not uniform, there were also indications of a ‘rediscoveredquotidian’, a desire for ecstatic communality and popular celebration thatcould not be entirely coopted and commodified by the capitalist imperativesof the West. Although such expressions are often much more modest andpragmatic than those envisaged by the more radical exponents of the critiqueof everyday life, such as the Situationists, they still manifest utopian quali-ties. The Berlin events, in short, demonstrate that the everyday remains a‘space for unfulfilled possibilities and for unseen but profound transform-ations’ (Moran, 2004: 233). This conclusion dovetails with the ideas of Bloch,who also argued that while utopian gestures and insights can be neutralizedor commodified, and thereby function as a ‘palliative ideology’, otherutopian configurations are equally rooted in the actual dynamics of historyand can still be brought to fruition. Indeed, this is related to what Bloch callsthe ‘cultural surplus’ of utopian dreaming, which can never be fully containedideologically or negated by the status quo. Such a surplus can continue togenerate new constellations of meaning and significances in times wellbeyond our own. The ‘dream of a better life’, writes Bloch, ‘reaches into each


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kind of cultural anticipation. Each plan and each form driven to the limits ofperfection came in contact with utopia and gave, particularly to the greatworks of a culture, those that take effect in a continuously progressive way,a surplus reaching beyond their mere stationary ideology.’ (Bloch, 1988: 118;original emphasis).

All the theorists discussed here therefore see a utopian promise burieddeep within the rituals and symbolic forms associated with everyday prac-tices, in a manner that reveals the openness of the present to future change,what Frederic Jameson calls the ‘signs and foreshadowings of future being’(1971: 123). Yet, even within such a relatively cohesive body of ideas asMarxism, the everyday must be regarded as a ‘contested and opaque terrain,where meanings are not to be found ready-made’, as Ben Highmore puts it(2002b: 1). The same, needless to say, can be said for utopianism. In whatfollows, I will discuss the attempt by this Central European Marxist traditionto grapple with this notion of ‘everyday utopianism’. I present these ideas inthe chronological order of each individual thinker’s intervention, mainlybecause each was aware of previous work, and each tried to update and buildupon the achievements of his or her predecessors in a manner that gives theseideas a rough coherence, albeit taking the form of a Benjaminian ‘constella-tion’ rather than some sort of systematic or overarching unity.7 What I hopeto demonstrate is that Marxist theory has much of value to tell us abouteveryday life, its still relatively unknown qualities and untapped potentials,which in turn reveals its intersection with myriad utopian possibilities.

MARX: THE ‘RELIGION OF EVERYDAY LIFE’

The fundamental ambivalence regarding everyday life mentioned above canbe seen clearly in the writings of Marx himself, as well as those of his closecollaborator, Engels. Marx, as is well known, wanted to combat the abstrac-tions of his German idealist predecessors, predominantly Hegel, as well asthe no less abstract and reductive materialism of Feuerbach and other suchpretenders to Hegel’s throne. To this end, Marx admonishes us to turn ourthoughts away from arcane theological and philosophical debates in order tograsp actual social practices and relationships, as these are located in thesphere of daily existence. To focus exclusively on rarified ideas, or on‘man[sic, and passim]-in-general’, was not only to misunderstand profoundlythe true nature of human beings and their social relations. It was, in hisopinion, to contribute actively to the enslavement of the working class inalienated conditions of existence that were almost entirely beyond theirunderstanding or control. So convinced was Marx of this that he typicallyconstrued the phenomenon of ‘ideology’ as a body of representations thatfunctioned to deflect attention away from the realities of concrete social life


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toward a realm of spectral abstractions and idealizations (Larrain, 1983). Inthe realm of ideology, he reasoned, real socio-economic contradictions andconflicts were ‘solved’ at the level of the imaginary or fantastical. This notionis rendered most explicitly in an early text that remained unpublished inMarx’s and Engels’s lifetime, The German Ideology, where it is argued thatcapitalist social relations encourage a systematic misunderstanding of theworld and our place in it, through a process of inversion or reversal. Inevoking the famous metaphor of the ‘camera obscura’, Marx and Engelssought to argue that such ideological transpositions prompt social actors toattribute the determination of history and society wholly to ideas, and thephilosophical or religious systems that correspond to them, rather than tothe social organization of economic production, thereby buttressing theprevailing system of class division and exploitation. For Marx, the critiqueof ideology could not remain on the level of rarefied philosophical debate; ithad to be rooted in an understanding of the specific material conditions thatfostered ‘consciousness and its products’, together with the practical trans-formation of the material conditions of class society, so as to allow people torealize themselves in free, conscious activity: ‘Human emancipation will onlybe complete’, writes Marx, when as an ‘individual man, in his everyday life,in his work, and in his relationships, has become a species-being’ (Marx andEngels, 1978: 46).

Marx expanded on his initial theory of ideology in the famous shortchapter in vol. I of Capital entitled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and theSecret Thereof’. Here, he argues that capitalism has transformed personalworth into exchange value. The result is that the so-called ‘cash nexus’mediates all human activities and interactions, and trumps other, morequalitative sociocultural values and interests. But this has a positive side: bystripping away all semblance of past tradition and religious beliefs, of senti-mentality and bourgeois talk of ‘morality’, modernity has forced humanbeings to come to grips with their actual conditions of life. Unfortunately,the potential for this kind of sober and realistic assessment of the world isblocked by the cognitive dislocation encouraged by the fetishism of thecommodity. Marx theorizes that the commodity-form, whether it be a table,toothbrush or shoe, induces a kind of ‘collective amnesia’ with regard to itsorigins. Although he is vague as to the actual psychological mechanismsinvolved, Marx suggests that the spontaneous ‘common sense’ generated bycapitalism prevents us from looking beyond the surface appearance of thecommodity so as to grasp the underlying socio-economic relations that, inreality, produced it. Michael Billig cogently describes this idea as follows:

Marx roots the concealment [of socio-economic realities] in the inter-course of everyday life. Custom, or habit, fixes a price to commodities;and, in consequence, the hidden secret disappears from awareness.


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Marx’s brief remarks contain an implicit psychology: custom setsroutines, for which we use ‘obvious’ commonplace notions, but thesenotions drive from awareness the full nature of these routines.

Billig suggests that Marx’s remarkable insight here is not followed up with acoherent explanation of how mundane routines of economic intercoursebolster this kind of ‘amnesia’ on a day-to-day basis, apart from implying thatcommodity fetishism operates in a quasi-Freudian way to ‘repress’ (or at leastsublimate) a conscious awareness of the realities of capitalism (ibid.: 314).However, Marx does make it clear that it is not only in the mundaneconsciousness of people that this bedazzlement by surface appearances andthe resultant social ‘forgetting’ is located. It is found equally in all manner ofscholarly doctrines, such as bourgeois economics (which also fails manifestlyto understand how value is produced), or philosophies like British empiri-cism or Comtean positivism. This helps to explain why Marx routinely exco-riated these theories: by shifting attention away from the true nature of sociallife under capitalism towards various fanciful abstractions, fetishes andhobby-horses, they play a crucial role in the legitimation of class domination.The ‘cure’ for such pathology involves the decisive rejection of the supposedautonomy of ideas, and the pursuit of sociohistorical research into theproduction and reproduction of human life. In opposition to the pseudo-science of positivism et al., Marx argued that genuine science had to penetratethe realm of surface appearance to grasp the underlying constitutive relationsand structures that generate social relations, and which are not always avail-able to direct sensory experience. Genuine knowledge, in Marx’s opinion,therefore represented a fusion of the empirically sensuous and the philo-sophically abstract, a dialectical movement that takes up key elements of theeveryday and its contradictions, moves them to a higher level of conceptual-ization and understanding, and then spirals back to the concrete to reproducein thought a ‘rich totality of many determinations’ (Marx, 1989: 44).

It is at this point where Marx’s ambivalent stance towards the everydaycomes to a head. For him, we cannot ignore or trivialize the everyday, becausedaily life is where humanity’s essential powers and ‘species-activity’ is located,expressed and finally realized. Yet, we also need to understand capitalistmodernity as a complex, historically situated totality, with the practical goalof ending the systematic oppressions and alienations of class society andappropriating fully the wealth of human potentialities. We require a dialecti-cal science that neither ‘primly abstracts’ from the real nature of humanactivity, nor remains entangled in ‘false appearance and deception, [the]personification of things and the reification of production relations, thisreligion of everyday life’ (Marx, 1967: 830). Everyday life is both the cause ofand prophylactic for mystified and fetishized social relations, something to becelebrated, but also criticized and ultimately transfigured. But there are two


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further things to understand about Marx’s treatment of the everyday: first,breaking through the alienations and reifications induced by capitalist socialrelations and the commodity-form through the medium of class struggle willrelease utopian energies that will eventually help to dig capitalism’s own grave,to ‘set free the elements of the new society with which [the] old collapsingsociety itself is pregnant’ (Marx and Engels, 1980: 76); secondly, these utopianforces must be understood in a materialist sense, as something simultaneouslyrooted in present-day sociohistorical circumstances yet desperately at oddswith them. In other words, the critique of idealism not only concerns howour experience and understanding of the everyday are distorted ideologicallyand misappropriated, as they are in bourgeois economics; it must be extendedto the criticism of idealist modes of utopian thinking as well. A convincingargument can be made that in repudiating abstract or idealist utopias, Marxdid not seek to embrace a kind of naïve empiricism and dispense with utopian-ism tout court. As Geoghegan suggests persuasively, what is under attack inMarx is not anticipation or utopian expressions as such, but ‘rather the failureto root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essentialdynamics of capitalism’ (Geoghegan, 1987: 27).8 But it did mean that hestruggled with the nature and significance of utopia, no less than that ofeveryday life and their interrelationship. In any event, the tension or ambiv-alence regarding Marx’s and Engels’s apprehension of ‘everyday utopianism’continued throughout the work of the various ‘western’ Marxists of the 20thcentury. Arguably, Georg Lukács is the key figure in this context. Beforediscussing his contribution, however, a short detour through the ideas of theGerman social thinker Georg Simmel is required.

SIMMEL: THE ‘TECHNOLOGY OF METROPOLITANLIFE’

Georg Simmel was an oddball genius and a prolific, wide-ranging thinkerwho blurred the lines between various academic genres and styles of exposi-tion (Simmel, 1987). Despite periodic flashes of interest in his work, heremained a marginal figure within German intellectual life during his lifetime.Nevertheless, Simmel had an enormous impact on an entire generation ofCentral European scholars, including such luminaries as Benjamin, ErnstBloch, Martin Heidegger, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim and Lukács,not least because many of them attended his seminars at Berlin Universitybefore the First World War. Lukács himself referred to Simmel as ‘the mostimportant and interesting transitional phenomenon in all of modern phil-osophy’ (Lukács, 1991: 145). His use of the word ‘transitional’ is significant,because Simmel is arguably the crucial link between the writings of Marx andEngels and the western Marxists with respect to the understanding of


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everyday utopianism. Although Marx did formulate initially the theories ofalienation and commodity fetishism, he tended to focus on how these relatedto capitalist economic processes. Simmel, by contrast, sought to graspmodernity as a distinct sociocultural formation that transformed daily exist-ence, engendered a wide range of new affective and sensory effects, andopened up new possibilities for living. And, although Simmel never explic-itly declared himself a Marxist, it is nonetheless clear that in suggesting thathis sociology builds ‘another storey beneath historical materialism’, he sawno essential contradiction between the tenets of Marx and his more cultur-alist and social-psychological orientation.

Simmel is important because he developed an innovative phenomenologyof culture that sought to grasp how the diverse practices, spaces and objectsin an urbanized everyday life manifested latent significances (Goodstein,2002). As he argued in his 1900 masterwork The Philosophy of Money, thediagnostician of modernity can find in each particle of daily life ‘the totalityof its meaning’. Such a novel sociological method focuses on the formal prop-erties of given modes of ‘sociation’, by which he meant ‘styles’ or ‘forms’ oflife, and relates them to their intellectual and historical contexts. For Simmel,accordingly, to study the everyday is analogous to the microscopic analysisof cells in biology. Just as with their biological counterparts, social ‘cells’interact with each other continuously, in the innumerable fleeting and moreenduring interactions that make up day-to-day city life. But although hedetects a connection between the micro- and macroscopic in such myriaddetails, he does not counsel us merely to glimpse the societal whole in eachof its component parts, because the everyday must also be understood in situ.‘[To] the adequately trained eye the totality of beauty, the complete meaningof the world as a whole, radiates from every single point’, as Simmel writes(1968: 69). He sought to understand the very ‘everydayness’ of mundanesocial existence, not to only see in the objects and passing moments of dailylife a sign of something ‘deeper’ or more ‘fundamental’. Simmel’s methodol-ogy is therefore rigorously anti-reductionist: like each spot of light andcolour in a kaleidoscope that reveals a hidden pattern when brought intocorrect alignment, his ‘sociological impressionism’ privileges neither theisolated detail nor the abstract system. Rather, each is part of a mutuallyrevealing interpretive dialectic that produces ‘snapshots’ of everyday life inthe modern world, but taken from the ‘standpoint of eternity’ (Frisby, 1985).What tickled Simmel’s fancy was not the value of any particular interpret-ation of an empirical phenomenon, whether fashion, gossip, or holidays, butrather to develop a new and more innovative style of sociological expositionbetter suited to the experience of modernity. The result is that Simmel’svarious excurses into the culture of the modern everyday approximateClifford Geertz’s call for the ‘thick description’ of sociocultural existence asit is actually lived and felt (Geertz, 1973).


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Simmel’s desire to develop a new method and style of sociological writingwas animated by his proto-existentialist concern for the fate of humanfreedom and ethics in the context of modernity. This brings us to the notionof the ‘tragedy of culture’, which has proven to be enormously influentialwithin western Marxism. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel suggests that,under capitalism, the products of culture are separated from practical humanactivity, and confront human beings as objective, anonymous forces. Accord-ingly, human relationships become subject to a process of instrumentaliza-tion and intellectualization. The result is that objective culture becomesseparated from human subjectivity, and the scope for individual autonomyand creativity becomes severely attenuated. This is the tragedy and conun-drum of modern life: that although ultimately the product of active humanpraxis, the world we create is presented to us as something bereft of intrin-sic meaning and coherence, and hence often as alien and threatening. Thereifications induced by the money economy clearly weighed on Simmel’sethical sensibilities. Capitalist rationalization not only results in the alien-ation of the individual producer from the object, as Marx noted; it alsoencourages the transformation of human subjectivity into what Simmeldescribes as ‘cool reserve and anonymous objectivity’. We can flourish indense urban settings because we are largely indifferent to the fate of thosearound us, and we do this by shaping our psyche in line with the sort ofcalculating mentality demanded by a money- and commodity-basedeconomy. As Simmel puts it, ‘one may characterize the intellectual functionsthat are used at present in coping with the world and in regulating both indi-vidual and social relations as calculative functions’ (Frisby, 1984: 108). Thisis so not least because, under modernity, human purpose and action aremediated increasingly by objects, rather than other people, and technicalconsiderations of efficiency and narrowly goal-oriented behaviour tend tosupplant relationships of an ethical and qualitative nature. In particular,Simmel is fascinated by the extent to which money, although the ultimatesymptom and symbol of human reification, becomes the common substra-tum of value for virtually all social actors. Because it can be converted intoany commodity imaginable, money has a dehumanizing effect; to paraphraseMarx, money transcends things like inherited status or even natural ability,and can make the ugly person beautiful, the dullard fascinating. Yet, moneyalso has strangely egalitarian effects. In so far as it is the generality thatmediates all particularity, the crucial nexus that binds modern societytogether, money can be the means through which a near infinity of humanneeds and desires is satisfied, which has the paradoxical outcome of ‘level-ling out’ conventional social distinctions. Furthermore, money is an infi-nitely transmutable phenomenon that can impart value to the most diversecontents imaginable, a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’, makingpossible ever-changing material realities, experiences and world-views.


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Simmel had an equally dialectical view of the nature of the modern metrop-olis. The sheer density of urban space, the chaotic multiplicity of groups andindividuals we interact with on a daily basis, and the compression of time andspace through various modernizing and technological processes, mean thateveryday life in the contemporary city is marked by a constant bombardmentof the senses. But the results are contradictory: along with overstimulationand the blasé attitude that is an adaptive response to it, comes an inestimablerichness and variety of objects and experiences. Modern urban ‘nomadism’does bring with it negative consequences, such as the breakdown oftraditional social support networks, or the demise of the sort of existentialand cosmological certitudes of the past. And, certainly, we all have to adjustto the abstract and quantitative aspects of mass urban existence. However, inexactly how any given individual adapts to these conditions, there is muchleeway: the very universality and objectivity of modern existence allow forthe cultivation of a wide range of subjective orientations, thereby encourag-ing ‘qualitative differences’ between diverse groups and persons that had notexisted previously. Modernity frees up hitherto repressed human potentials,encourages a broader and more cosmopolitan outlook and breaks down thestultifying prejudices and blind spots inherited from more hidebound,traditional societies. Everyday life becomes a kind of individual project, a‘work of art’ constituting an end in itself, accomplished through the refine-ment of individual tastes and dispositions in a manner symptomatic of thegeneral ‘aestheticization’ of daily existence under modernity (Featherstone,1992).

Simmel’s work was largely compatible with Marxism on the level of broadtheories and concepts, but his political sympathies were always morereformist than radical (Leck, 2000). He maintained a complex and dialecticalview of modern urban life, juxtaposing positive and negative factors withoutever arriving at some overarching synthesis in which all such tensions andcontradictions are resolved. Yet, on balance, Simmel was relatively upbeatabout the prospects for humanity under modernity, especially with regard tothe expanding horizons of individual freedom and the possibilities for self-expression through the aestheticization of daily life. He did not regardmodern society as a utopia per se, but he did feel it was animated by certainutopian propensities, in that the supersession of tradition raised the possi-bility of the secular realization of what were once exclusively theologicalideals of plenitude and fulfilment. ‘Modern salvation was achieved when aperson’s being formed a unified whole, radiating a consistent personal stylefrom an unseen central point. Simmel was making a call for peaceful culturalanarchy in which freely interacting individuals would not hinder oneanother’s self-realization’, writes Harry Liebersohn (1988: 154). In promot-ing this sort of ‘everyday utopianism’, Simmel showed himself to be resolutelyanti-metaphysical: for him, the possibilities of human freedom had to be


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sought in the here and now, in tandem with certain tendencies that weregrounded in the real processes of modernization and that could not beblithely ignored.

LUKÁCS: ‘RIDDLE OF THE COMMODITY-STRUCTURE’

It is clear from the preceding discussion that Simmel maintained a relativelyeven-handed and dialectical view of everyday life in the modern world andits utopian possibilities. As such, it may seem strange that when the FirstWorld War began in earnest, after some initial hesitation, he embraced en-thusiastically the war effort of the Central Powers. Simmel saw in the con-flagration the promise of a full-blown ‘authenticity’ of a proto-Heideggeriansort, by overcoming the ‘tragedy of culture’ he identified with modernity andthe forging of a new German identity rooted in a collective struggle guidedby wholly transcendental, anti-materialistic values. Yet, this was a commonenough position at the time: even the German Social Democratic Party,which sent delegates to a large European peace conference shortly before theconflict broke out, voted enthusiastically for war credits, mass conscriptionand the extensive militarization of German society. In judging his work as awhole, however, we can conclude that Simmel was not particularly attractedto the pessimism and irrationalism of his romanticist contemporaries, andnor was he implacably anti-capitalist.

On the other hand, what Lukács himself once described as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, the belief that modern capitalism had created a soulless, mechan-ical civilization in the place of an organic and integrated premoderncommunity, was very widespread at the time. For complex reasons that cannotbe chronicled here (Sayre and Löwy, 1984), a romantic anti-capitalism repletewith strikingly Messianic elements (derived mainly from Jewish theologicalsources) played an influential role in European social thought in the late 19thand early 20th centuries.9 It left its mark on the writings of such thinkers asTönnies, Troeltsch and Landauer, as well as Lukács – and, albeit in a signifi-cantly different way, Walter Benjamin. Michael Löwy has identified the twocentral features of this Messianic impulse as follows: (1) restoration, a heart-felt yearning for a lost Edenic paradise or ‘Golden Age’; and (2) utopia, thedesire to re-establish this paradisiacal condition at some future time (Löwy,1980: 106). This problematic synthesis of conservative and revolutionaryimpulses is the defining characteristic of modern Messianism. Only a cata-strophic transformation of a degraded secular world could reverse humanity’sfall from a prelapsidarian state of grace and reunite a fractured and tragicallyflawed cosmos. Messianism was therefore irrevocably opposed to any formof reformism or ameliorism. In this aggressively revolutionary form, it


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represented a profound challenge to many of the central assumptions ofmodernity, especially the Enlightenment faith in the unbroken continuity ofprogress and the irreversible improvement of humanity’s lot in every conceiv-able field of endeavour (Wohlfarth, 1989).

Lukács agreed with many disillusioned intellectuals of his generation thatthey were living in an age of intense cultural and spiritual crisis (Fehér, 1977).Especially in his early, pre-Marxist writings, he argued that capitalist civiliz-ation represented a brazenly materialistic and God-forsaken social order thathad destroyed the last vestiges of genuine community. At this time, Lukácssubscribed to an essentially Manichean world-view, which projected a starkcontrast between a debased world of mundane bourgeois existence on theone hand, and a Platonic realm of absolute values and quasi-existentialist‘authenticity’ on the other. This dualism was the major source of Lukács’stragic vision, which for him entailed a retreat into a highly personalisticmysticism tempered by bouts of pessimistic despair. However, he didenvisage a partial deliverance from the inauthenticity of everyday life throughaesthetic experience, which contained genuine values and was separate fromthe philistine, ‘dishonest’ realities of ordinary existence. Art is a repositoryof authenticity not only because it could evoke vividly such past ‘GoldenAges’ as pre-classical Greece, where there was no dichotomy between selfand world and where meaning was rooted in the organic community, but alsoin that it held out the possibility of realizing such a paradisiacal state in thefuture (Lukács, 1971a). Ultimately, however, Lukács came to regard suchpurely aesthetic solutions to the degraded character of the everyday as unsat-isfactory. Rather than having his nationalism bolstered by the carnage of theFirst World War, as was the case with Simmel, Lukács was extremelydisturbed by the conflict. Finding succour in the apparent triumph of the1917 Russian Revolution, he came to the conclusion that art, in and of itself,could not redeem debased social conditions. Whereas his youthful ‘ethicalpessimism’ saw no possible way of broaching the duality between the ‘Is’ ofmundane existence and the ‘Ought’ of idealist philosophy, once Lukácscommitted himself to the communist cause, he discovered a tangible agent ofredemption: namely, the revolutionary proletariat. Accordingly, the everydaywas viewed increasingly by Lukács, not so much as a sphere of metaphysi-cally ‘inauthentic’ existence, but as the primary social terrain wherein classcontradictions were manifested and a militantly anti-capitalist consciousnessmight be generated (Roberts, 1999: 18). Influenced by the anarchism andrevolutionary syndicalism of Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxembourg andGeorge Sorel, Lukács’s idiosyncratic Marxism took on an increasingly apoc-alyptical character. There was no room for compromise when it came to thecomplete supersession of capitalism, mainly because, contra Simmel, therewas nothing faintly worthwhile or redeemable about it, except perhaps as anincubator of the forces of production necessary for an ‘objective’ leap into


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communism. Since capitalism could only be understood as a totalizingsystem in which the logic of commodity production seeped into every nookand cranny of daily existence, it could never be reformed, but only destroyedroot and branch, and replaced entirely by socialism. ‘The real contributionof the capitalist epoch to the construction of the future consists in its creatingthe possibilities of its own collapse and in its ruins, even creates the possi-bilities of the construction of the future’, as Lukács wrote in 1920 (Lukács,1973: 19).

These diverse influences crystallized in his 1923 work History and ClassConsciousness, where Lukács develops an account of reification and alien-ation derived mainly from his reading of the passage in Marx’s Capital oncommodity fetishism, leavened with Simmel’s musings on the ‘tragedy ofculture’. For Lukács, reification was the ‘necessary, immediate reality ofevery person living in capitalist society’ (Lukács, 1971b: 197). In order toliberate humankind from such mystified beliefs, he argued that it was thecentral task of the proletariat to challenge this ‘metaphysical passivity’ bydeveloping a revolutionary class consciousness and confronting the ossifiedstructures of bourgeois power. (Exactly how this would happen is notentirely clear in Lukács’s book, an omission that can be explained by hisessentially anarchistic belief in the masses’ revolutionary spontaneity, aposition he later recanted, in a belated attempt to conform to Stalinist ortho-doxy.) Following a successful revolutionary transformation, social contra-dictions would be reconciled or superseded in the Hegelian sense, and aunified, organic social totality would replace the fragmentation and disson-ance engendered by modern capitalism.

In Lukács’s writings from this period, his views on the everyday and itsrelationship to utopia acquire a definite socio-political content. Yet, at thesame time, they retain the Messianic and eschatological flavour of his earlierwork. The major difference is that the goal of transcending everyday life andresurrecting genuine community is legitimated by reference to a Marxist, asopposed to a theological, vocabulary. Simmel, it will be recalled, saw in theGesellschaft of urban, capitalist existence the possibility of enhanced personalfreedom and self-expression, in which a successful balance could be achievedbetween social interests and individual desires and impulses. For Lukács, bycontrast, the daily life of modernity was so debased that redemption wouldonly be possible by superseding completely the everyday – or, to be moreprecise, by returning to what is essentially a romanticized, non-urban andpre-capitalist society, in which what Lefebvre called ‘everydayness’ isconspicuous by its absence. In defining capitalism solely in terms of spiritualand social decay, rather than as a contradictory social formation containingboth destructive and liberatory forces, and by maintaining the belief thathistory would culminate in a revivified Gemeinschaft that reconciled subjectand object, Lukács subscribed to a position that was undialectical and


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ahistorical in the extreme. In the words of Harootunian, Lukács manifestlyfailed to grasp the

. . . experience of everyday life as a coherently worthy subject of investi-gation and instead looked to the larger structures of the social totalitywhose behaviour would reveal the impending collapse of the capitalistmode of production and its social formation. Structures offered entry toconcrete and material reality while experience was often relegated toideological reflection. In this sense, the everyday was subsumed undercapitalism and modernity, consciousness and experience frozen in areified state that, according to Lukács, only the proletariat – despitebeing transformed into the figure of a ‘dehumanized’ commodityatrophying the ‘soul’ – was still able ‘to rebel against reification.’(Harootunian, 2000: 71–2)

BENJAMIN: ‘DREAM-HOUSES OF THECOLLECTIVE’

However flawed, Lukács’s theory of reification paved the way for westernMarxists to understand daily life in the modern world in terms of commod-ification. To comprehend the everyday, it was realized that we need toconfront the status of the objects in our profane experience as commodities,and how their effects are registered in human consciousness, social behav-iour and cultural forms. The central members of the Frankfurt School pickedup on this notion, and made it an essential part of their studies. As anexample, in his book Minima Moralia Adorno voices his distaste for the‘withering away of experience’, which he believes to be a consequence of‘identity-thinking’, the tendency in the modern world to conflate the ‘real’with a totalizing system of static concepts and ideas. Identity-thinking was,in his opinion, made possible by the abstract equivalence between all thingspromoted by exchange-value, especially in the form of money, whereinconcrete particulars are homogenized and effectively destroyed. At the sametime, however, the Frankfurt School agreed with Lukács that reification wasall-encompassing, and that ‘false consciousness’ had become so pervasive anddeep-rooted that the oppressed could no longer comprehend their experienceof alienation, much less do anything about it.10 Transitory moments of non-alienated experience could only be glimpsed furtively in the most avant-gardeof artworks and theoretical reflections – aesthetic and intellectual practiceswhich, by virtue of their very complexity and symbolic opacity, resistedabsorption into the ‘culture industry’. In abandoning the search for tenden-cies of progressive social change within everyday life itself, and refusingLukács’s Messianic ‘solution’ of seeing in the revolutionary proletariat (and


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later the Communist Party) an escape from a routinized and commodifieddaily existence, the central thinkers of the Frankfurt School viewed theeveryday as ‘irredeemably pedestrian and commodified’ (Agger, 1998: 142).This left them little option but to fall back on a Weberian pessimism andbaroque kulturkritik that displayed many elitist and anti-populist tendencies(Baugh, 1990).

Although a peripheral member of the Frankfurt School who was influencedstrongly by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Benjamin took a verydifferent path with regard to the question of everyday life and its relation toutopia. For him, it was the everyday world itself that was open to somemeasure of redemption, to positive transformation, although he would hardlydispute the notion that the highest achievements of art or critical intellectualenquiry were integral to a fully lived human existence. It may well be the casethat what is repressed in modernity is precisely ‘the force of the prosaic, thecounter-authenticity [of] the texture and rhythm of our daily lives anddecisions, the myriad of minute and careful adjustments that we are ready tooffer in the interests of a habitable world’, as Michael André Bernstein writes(Bernstein, 1992: 182). Benjamin also knew, however, that everyday life in themodern world was not completely bereft of emancipatory possibilities.Although he was not as optimistic as Simmel about modernity, he did believethat there were always hidden ‘constellations’ of qualitative meaning andsubterranean rumblings of dissent in the margins and interstices of the moderncity. In the minutiae of daily life, the very ‘banality’ of which is worth savour-ing, we can find a polysemy of gestures, practices and symbols that are notentirely overshadowed by the logic of the commodity-form. For instance,Benjamin thought that boredom was a peculiarly modern refusal to conformto the omnipresent compulsion to consume passively an ever-expanding rangeof goods and services, and hence could be interpreted as an expression of non-alienated experience (Moran, 2003; Svendsen, 2005).

Given this, how does Benjamin approach the everyday? In his eclectic andwide-ranging writings, he rarely evokes the term ‘everyday life’ or theorizesabout it explicitly, as others have noted (Osborne, 1995: 180; Roberts, 1999:21). Yet, it is equally apparent that a preoccupation with daily existenceconstitutes something of a leitmotiv for Benjamin, especially in his laterwritings. This orientation was precipitated at least in part by his encounterwith Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht (not to mention his then paramour,the Latvian communist Asja Lacis), and the growing militancy of his politics,especially after the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the rise ofNazism in the early 1930s. Benjamin’s project can therefore be read as a‘heterogeneous project for rescuing the everyday life of modernity fromsilence’, as Highmore neatly puts it (Highmore, 2002a: 61). Part and parcelof this ‘heterogeneous project’ involves assessing the nature of humanexperience and the ways it has been transformed in the wake of capitalist


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modernization, but also how the everyday had been ignored or disabused bymost western philosophical traditions. As to the latter, although it hadundoubtedly contributed to the advancement of individual freedom andcritical reason, Benjamin argues that the Enlightenment encouraged a regret-table narrowing and impoverishment of what it means to be ‘human’. Kant,for example, acknowledges everyday life as an intrinsic part of human exist-ence, but relegates it to a ‘lower order’ than reflective, abstract cognition. Bycontrast, Benjamin argues that myriad passions, affects and epiphanies are asmuch a part of the ‘systematic continuum’ of human experience as ourcapacity for rational thought. The alternative to the Enlightenment tendencyto project abstract standards of truth on to the world is to try to close thegap between representation and the sensuously experiential, to understandthe world in theoretical terms, but to not lose sight of the concreteness ofthings, their literal ‘everydayness’. It is also worth noting that Benjamin wastransfixed by Brecht’s dictum that ‘truth is concrete’, and best expressedthrough the vehicle of ‘coarse thoughts’, which direct theory toward practice.This preference for the concrete is also evidenced in Benjamin’s affinity forthe oral medium, in so far as he privileges the mimetic power of spokenlanguage, what Barthes (1977) called the ‘grain of the voice’, over its strictlycommunicative or semiotic function. Benjamin not only sought to come togrips with lived experience in conceptual terms: he also conveys the bodilyand the experiential through his very style of written expression. As AnsonRabinbach (1979: 11) asserts, Benjamin’s prose ‘attempts to restore thevarious dimensions of the sensual through its direct and transparentexpression, which constantly evokes a world in which both the sensuous andnon-sensuous correspondences are manifest. [It] is perhaps the most visualand corporeal philosophical prose we possess.’

Benjamin’s approach here has many similarities with Simmel’s focus on theeveryday minutiae of capitalist modernity. He agrees with Simmel that theexploration of the modern everyday must occur on two different levels: first,in terms of material culture and the built environment (specifically, the capi-talist city); and secondly, with respect to how this urban setting shapeshuman psychology, bodies and social interactions. As mentioned above,Simmel argues that the continuous rush and tumult of life in the capitalistmetropolis bombards the human sensory apparatus, to which individualsadapt psychologically by developing a ‘blasé’ attitude of emotional distanceand self-interested, rational calculation. Benjamin (1968: 176) largely agreeswith this, but places considerably more emphasis on how capitalist industri-alization and routinization effectively re-engineer the human psyche andcorporeal habitus. Mechanization and repetitive motion become a generalizedmetaphor for life under modernity, and are not simply about the labourprocess per se. ‘The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd’,writes Benjamin, ‘corresponds to what the worker “experiences” at his


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machine.’ For Benjamin, people’s actions in both their working and everydaylives have become increasingly automatized and more ‘massified’, constitut-ing an ‘amorphous crowd of passers-by’, rather than a true community. Sucha ‘mass’ consists of people uniformly similar in dress, use of facial expressionsand spoken idioms: they are more interchangeable, yet at the same time, likeSchopenhauer’s porcupines, increasingly isolated from each other. Nonethe-less, the basic idea is the same in the respective writings of Simmel andBenjamin: that the effects of alienation and reification pervade the modernsocial world, and one significant result is a stereotypical everyday conscious-ness and manner of bodily deportment that is characterized by habituated‘distraction’. Such a distracted mode of being does present the individual withcertain coping mechanisms: it allows us to cushion ourselves better from thecontinual ‘shocks’ and traumas of modernity, to ‘roll with the punches’ ofrapid social changes that can be disorienting and anomic in the extreme. Butsuch adaptations are acquired at tremendous cost: as the fabric of traditionalsocial relations unravels and nothing is left but the cash-nexus, the collectiverituals and traditions that bound premodern societies together, and that hadtransmitted coherent, shared life-narratives from generation to generation,are effectively lost. These forms of collective solidarity and affirmation arereplaced in the modern world by social atomization, the fragmentation ofexperience, and an egotistical, almost solipsistic, individualism. As such, weare ‘increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around [us] byway of experience’, concludes Benjamin (1968: 158). Hence, it is not enoughto ‘adapt’ to these forces; in contradistinction to Simmel, they have to becontested and ultimately transformed.

In many respects, Benjamin’s assessment here is not terribly different fromthat of Lukács. But they part company in at least one crucial respect: whereasLukács’s romantic anti-capitalism leads him to yearn for a reconstructedsocial totality modelled on the supposed Gemeinschaft communities ofpremodern times, for Benjamin the task is one of locating in the shards andfragments of specifically modern everyday life the resources for future socialtransformation. Such a project necessarily involves a radical break with pasttraditions. In other words, to redeem tradition, especially the suffering ofinnumerable past generations, it must be destroyed (Buck-Morss, 1989).Benjamin does not prompt us to look backwards at a ‘Golden Age’ ofpresumptively genuine community, but rather to detect the pulse of utopianenergies in the here and now (and in the most unlikely of places), to tap intothese forces, revivify them and link them to transformative political praxis.The essential premise here is that there has existed in the collective conscious-ness of humanity since time immemorial countless dreams and ‘wish-images’of a free human society founded on equality and universal material abun-dance. But although rooted in a timeless past, what is important to Benjaminabout such wish-images is that they are anticipations (pace Ernst Bloch) of a


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transformed future society, and hence a kind of ‘dreaming forward’, or‘future nostalgia’. Paradoxically, the actual content of these wish-images of afuture society is culled from the symbols and narratives of an archaic ‘Ur-history’ of humankind – the ‘lost paradise’ of a primitive egalitarian society.However, they also envision the radically new, not merely recapitulateendlessly an idealized past history. ‘In the dream in which every epoch seesin images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to elements ofUr-history, that is, of a classless society’, as Benjamin (1973: 159) says.

Such wish-images are best understood as sparks or flashes of insight andawakening that are spurs to practice, not ‘blueprints’ of some sort of fullyimagined, perfect society of the future. As such, Benjamin’s position hereescapes the charge of ‘social engineering’ that is often levelled at utopianism(Popper, 1969). Furthermore, these visions can only be realized successfullyif wedded to the immense technological potential of modernity. WhatBenjamin called the ‘phantasmagorical’ qualities of the commodity world –especially the visual consumption of signs and images, ranging from thephysical organization of the 19th-century Parisian arcades to fashion andadvertising – have drained the utopian dream of its creative, anticipatory coreand inculcated a debilitating ‘false consciousness’. The wish-image continuesto channel utopian desire, but in the form of a commodity fetish that canonly be satisfied through a ‘distracted’ and atomized consumption of thesuperabundant commodities, mass spectacles and entertainments profferedby capitalist modernity. The result is that the social world once again becamemythified, congealed into a barren landscape of naturalized, eternal forms.This is bolstered by the seductive Enlightenment narrative of infiniteprogress and endless growth – an ‘empty, homogeneous time’ in whichhuman agency and collective will are abandoned to an inescapable fate. Indi-viduals are condemned to engage in the ceaseless, repetitive production andconsumption of ostensibly new goods and services, in a manner akin toNietzsche’s doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’, to squander their creative energiesin reified and alienated sociocultural forms. Hence, it is increasingly difficultto escape the sense that capitalist social relations are part of the inherent orderof things, a fossilized ‘second nature’, and seemingly impervious to trans-formation. But to achieve this goal we must challenge decisively the re-entrenchment of a mythological consciousness that lies at the very heart ofmodern industrial society, to clear away the ‘underbrush of delusion andmyth’ (Benjamin, 1983–4: 2).

But how did Benjamin propose to counter this process of ‘mythification’and the social ‘forgetting’ that it induces? Again, unlike Lukács or the Frank-furt School, Benjamin found inspiration in the utopian dreams, wish-imagesand artefacts of the everyday mass culture of the modern city. The task athand for him was one of rescuing the ‘truth-content’ of such images from thephantasmagoria of the commodity and the mythification of the social world.


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This involved tearing these profane objects and images out of the monolithiccontinuity of ‘official’ history with a ‘firm, apparently brutal grasp’ (ibid.:22). The most apt metaphor of this approach was one of the collector or‘ragpicker’, a figure that sifts through the scraps and debris of moderneveryday life in order to glean what is worthwhile out of what has beendiscarded or forgotten. In such ‘rescued’ objects and images can be foundmultiple temporalities and historical possibilities, which are currently ‘out offashion’, coexisting in the same range of material artefacts. In the words ofHighmore, the ragpicker’s task becomes one of ‘cataloguing the brokenpromises that have been abandoned in the everyday trash of history’(Highmore, 2002a: 65). By juxtaposing various descriptions, images andreportages in montage-like fashion and with a minimum of interpretiveoverlay, individuals might be encouraged to forge their own ‘constellations’of meaning out of these ‘dialectical fairy-tales’. This could lead to a ‘profaneillumination’ of the social world that might unleash the collective energies ofthe proletariat and the technological possibilities of modernity in a mannerakin to the ‘splitting of the atom’. Although influenced by the montage tech-niques pioneered by the Surrealists, Benjamin parted company with theirtendency to wallow in fantasy and chance encounters, arguing that only acritical, rational knowledge of society and history can break through thereified and mythified structures of capitalist modernity, draw together thethreads of scattered memories and images into a coherent narrative andunlock the hidden utopian potential of the dream-state, thereby ‘awakening’the working masses from their slumber.11

Benjamin’s descent into the ‘Ur-history’ of modern everyday life wasintended to facilitate the transmission of a ‘counter-tradition’ of suffering andrevolt, in which the ‘secret agreement’ between the generations of past andpresent would be consummated. This helps to explain the urgency of hisinjunction that humankind not squander the precious legacy of the ‘weakmessianic power’ with which it has been endowed. And, although Benjamindrank from the same wellspring of ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ as did Lukács,their understanding and usage of such ostensibly theological motifs as‘redemption’ or the ‘Messianic’ diverged significantly. Whereas Lukács soughtto reconcile subject and object in a restored organic community, Benjaminharboured considerable doubts regarding the Hegelian desire for the recon-stitution of a lost totality and the reconciliation of all contradictions. Instead,Benjamin subscribed to what Adorno once termed a ‘negative theology’,which looked for signs of utopian possibility within marginalized orsuppressed human experiences and in the fleeting images of popular culture.There are no certitudes for Benjamin here: any attempt to redeem the frag-mented and reified world of capitalist modernity was fraught with innumer-able missteps and blind spots, and there is certainly no quasi-theologicalinsight into the telos of history to rely on. It was an unequal struggle in which


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the enemy had not ‘ceased to be victorious’, a sober assessment that explainshis self-described ‘radical pessimism’. Yet, Benjamin was also acutely awarethat the price to be paid for the failure to redeem the semantic potentials ofthe past, and to strive to envisage and build the classless utopia through a‘definitive interruption’ of the present historical continuum, was a regressionto a new and even more virulent form of barbarism: namely, National Social-ism. Hence, despite his frequent use of religious and theological tropes,Benjamin is a profoundly anti-theological thinker. Utopia does not representthe terminus of the self-propelled juggernaut of capitalist modernity, or theinexorable unfolding of some divine plan. Rather, Benjamin understands theutopian moment as a uniquely human achievement, one that can only beconstructed collectively out of the ‘raw material’ of the modern, urbanizedeveryday.

AGNES HELLER: ‘UTOPIAS ARE IN THE PRESENT,NOT IN THE FUTURE’

Born in Hungary in 1929, Agnes Heller was a star pupil and research assist-ant of Lukács. Expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party and theUniversity of Budapest for her ‘revisionist’ views following the faileduprising of 1956, she was eventually ‘rehabilitated’ in 1963, whereuponHeller engaged in historical research on the Renaissance. This kindled a keeninterest in the problems and characteristics of everyday life, which eventu-ally led to the publication of her eponymous study Everyday Life in thetumultuous year of 1968. Heller’s preoccupation with the everyday wasalways closely intertwined with her political activities; specifically, the dissi-dent Marxism developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the young firebrandsassociated with the so-called ‘Budapest School’ (Gabel, 1975). Heller and herhusband Ferenc Fehér, a frequent intellectual collaborator, emigrated in 1977to Australia, eventually ending up at the New School for Social Research inNew York City, where she currently resides. Beginning roughly in the mid-1980s, Heller abandoned progressively her earlier adherence to Marxism,mainly because of its perceived Messianic and dogmatic tendencies, and hasaddressed in recent decades such diverse topics as historiography, politicalphilosophy, methodological issues in the human sciences, ethics, post-modernism and the sociology of state socialism (Heller and Fehér, 1991).

In what follows, I will concentrate on the theoretical orientation Hellerstaked out with respect to everyday life in the early 1960s to the early 1980s.At this time, she subscribed to a humanistic and Hegelian interpretation ofMarx that focused primarily on the latter’s early texts concerning alienation,self-realization and ‘species-being’. This was synthesized with the ideas ofcertain existentialist (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) and phenomenological


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(Kosík, Schütz) thinkers, especially their stress on lived experience within thelife-world, together with Lukács’s theory of social ontology (Wolin, 1987;Tormey, 2001). Another major influence upon Heller’s approach here isclassical western philosophy, such as Plato’s notion of doxa, or taken-for-granted opinions, as contrasted with episteme, or scientific truths. Along withthe other thinkers discussed here, Heller believes that everyday life cannot beconsidered in isolation, abstracted from wider social relations, institutionsand historical processes. Indeed, the structural differentiation of the everydayfrom other social spheres is, in her opinion, a relatively recent historicaldevelopment. In premodern societies, daily life was integrated fully into abroad range of productive, ritualistic and sacred practices, and becamedetached from these only in the modern era, when such ‘higher’ pursuits asscience, religion and art become the prerogative of elites and subject toinstitutionalization. In an argument that echoes closely one advanced by theRussian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) in his Rabelais and His World,Heller asserts that in the interregnum between the premodern and themodern – namely, in the Renaissance – there occurred a fruitful interchangebetween more specialized scientific and cultural pursuits and the commonpeople’s everyday lives. By the end of the 17th century, however, this creativeosmosis had ended (Heller, 1978). Rather than growing out of the rhythmsand textures of daily existence, human needs are increasingly subordinatedto the technical requirements of the rapidly expanding apparatus of capital-ist production and commodity exchange. And, within ‘learned’ discourse, theeveryday ‘came to be thematized from the standpoint of a “truth” which thendefined this life as void of truth’ (Heller, 1985a: 80).

This disparagement of daily life, Heller argues, began to change decisivelyin the 20th century, with the emergence of such social theories and philoso-phies as hermeneutics, phenomenology and Verstehen sociology. Shecontends that these developments could only have arisen if the everyday wasrecognized as problematic, and hence deserving of study in the first place.This is largely because modernity represents a distinct threat to the integrityof the everyday, by subjecting it to an extensive process of bureaucraticrestructuring and rationalization. But although modern social thought hasbecome aware of the very existence of ‘everyday life’, it has generally viewedit as ‘inauthentic’ (Heller identifies Heidegger’s Being and Time as especiallysymptomatic of this line of thinking), or else treated it in an uncritical andessentially descriptive fashion, wherein the mundane life-world is construedas an unchanging and immutable entity (as in the work of Schütz, forexample). Heller strives to avoid the shortcomings of both extremes. Sheinsists that everyday life has to be analysed on its own terms; yet she alsowants to retain a dialectical and critical focus, by asserting that the everydayhas dynamic but typically suppressed potentialities that need to be broughtto fruition. In taking this position, Heller argues that daily life cannot be


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understood as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’, or even an ‘attitude’. Instead, she concep-tualizes the everyday as an ensemble of historically constituted practices andforms of subjectivity that are complexly related to and mediated by otherstructures, institutions and practices: ‘Everyday life is not “something” butrather the shared modern life-experience on which our intersubjective consti-tution of the world rests’, says Heller (1987: 297).

For Heller, the everyday is a universal human experience that concernsprimarily the social reproduction of the individual and her or his immediatein-group. As such, it exists in all societies, although of course the actualcontent of the mundane life-world and its relationship to wider sociohistor-ical forces is historically variable. Adhering to the philosophical anthropol-ogy developed by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, Heller argues that humanreproduction involves first and foremost our capacity for work. Work is a‘teleological project’ incorporating both physical and mental capacitiesthrough which we externalize ‘species-specific’ powers in the appropriationand transformation of nature, in a process of ‘objectivation’ that satisfies ourmaterial and social needs. In so doing, we ‘humanize’ nature and ‘naturalize’humanity, continually remaking ourselves through our usage and mastery oflanguage, tools and norms as reflexive, purposive and intersubjective crea-tures. It is in the everyday where human beings acquire certain skills andcompetencies to be able to function as acculturated and socialized membersof society. However, this sphere of immediate objectivation is typically takenfor granted by social actors, because it is part of their unquestioned ‘stockknowledge’ of the world. Indeed, Heller insists that the habitualization ofaction is to a certain extent necessary and desirable. For, as Schütz (1967)pointed out in his account of ‘typification’, correctly in Heller’s opinion,social intercourse and practical activities would be well-nigh impossible ifevery act, no matter how trivial or inconsequential, had to be scrutinized andconsciously planned and executed. As such, human behaviour in the contextof daily life is highly particularistic: the everyday is ruled by emotion andaffect; is repetitive and prone to analogical forms of reasoning and over-generalization; and is based upon immediate perceptions and experiences andsubordinated to the requirements of practical tasks at hand. In Lukácsianterminology, everyday consciousness is reified; it accepts fetishized appear-ances at face value and rarely attempts to delve beneath the surface of things.There is little impetus in the context of everyday life to transcend the immedi-ate situation and cultivate wider ‘species-specific’ powers and capacities.

This should not be taken to imply that social actors are mere automatonsor ‘cultural dopes’. As Heller (1987: 305) explains, ‘Norms need to be inter-preted in ever new contexts, persons need to take initiatives in unforeseeablesituations; they must also cope with the catastrophes of everyday life’.Furthermore, she insists that the particularistic nature of daily existence isnot eternal or immutable, but linked to historically contingent factors:


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specifically, it is capitalism that encourages this insular and ‘person-centred’form of existence. ‘Particularity is the subject of alienated everyday life’,suggests Heller (1984a: 15; emphasis added). The paradox is that by destroy-ing the traditionalism and parochialism of premodern societies, capitalistmodernity holds out the possibility of a universalization of certain valuesregarding human rights, freedoms and possibilities. In other words, Hellercleaves to the idea that modern society has to be understood dialectically,because it contains both domineering and emancipatory qualities, albeit inways that are not always easy to disentangle. Accordingly, the everyday life-world is not irredeemably corrupted (as Heidegger or Lukács maintain), orentirely static and habit-bound (à la Schütz), but a mixture of both routinizedand dynamic elements and open to continual change and transformation.However degraded and reified it might be under specific sociohistoricalconditions, for Heller the everyday expresses valid forms of knowledge andsuppressed potentialities that need to be identified and encouraged. Althoughthere are repetitive, habitualized and quasi-instinctive elements within theeveryday that will never disappear (and for good reason),12 Heller argues thatdaily life also generates a ‘cognitive’ or ‘cultural surplus’ imbued with myriadtransformative or utopian possibilities. This surplus can be translated intoless fragmented and heterodox and hence more ‘generic’ forms of humanactivity that concern the enhancement of species-being, or humanity ingeneral. Such an enriched experience, whether emotional or intellectual, canthen be re-directed back to daily life in order to change it. But to be able toreflect on and act within the everyday in such a state of heightened aware-ness, we have to render ‘unfamiliar’ what is usually taken for granted, toseparate figure from ground. Accordingly, Heller argues that such ‘higher’objectivations as art and philosophy, but also (less obviously) the fleeting andspontaneous joys and pleasures of private, intimate life, can play a centralrole in this ‘problematization’ of everyday life. These represent ‘utopian’moments that function to demystify ‘what is from the perspective of whatought-to-be – the unity of the good and the true’ (Heller, 1984b: 24). As such,she subscribes fully to the ‘everyday utopianism’ mentioned above, one thatis situated within the rhythms and practices of daily life, yet often in oppo-sition to the current social world. As Heller writes, utopias ‘are not merefigments of human imagination. They draw their strength from actuality;they exist, insofar as they exist, in the present. Utopia is lived, practised,maintained by men and women as a form of life’ (Heller, 1993: 58). Herposition is therefore one that repudiates the ‘strong’ Messianism associatedwith Lukács, but arguably not the ‘weak’ Messianism of Benjamin (Gardiner,1997). For, like Benjamin, Heller asserts that in pursuing the goal of ‘human-izing’ and democratizing everyday life we must strive to nurture utopianhopes within a largely (but not inevitably) dystopian society that exists in thepresent day. This requires a resoluteness of character and a determination to


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transform one’s existence and the collective life of humanity from an inher-ited ‘bundle of possibilities’ into destiny, within the terrain of the everyday.‘We have only one life and if this life does not turn out the way we wantedit, we can still enjoy everything it offers’, says Heller. ‘If “history” plays adirty trick on our hopes, we can still do better than despair: even in darktimes, we can maintain the hopes of humanity’ (Heller, 1985b: 39).

CONCLUSION

The preceding discussion has focused on four central Marxist thinkers –Marx himself, Lukács, Benjamin and Heller – along with a key ‘transitional’figure, Simmel, and other related figures in passing – as their ideas bear onthe concept of ‘everyday utopianism’ as sketched out in my introduction.Hopefully without projecting some sort of artificial unity, I have argued thatthey share certain overlapping positions, especially their determination notto regard the everyday as a ‘backdrop’ for ostensibly more important socialinstitutions or activities. Rather, they see the everyday as an important siteof ideological contestation and the formation of mass consciousness, andwherein particular human powers and characteristics are formulated and findexpression in a plethora of ideological and utopian forms (Jameson, 1976,1979). As such, the everyday does not consist only in habitualized or taken-for-granted behaviours and attitudes, although these are important elementsof daily life, especially in the context of modernity. It can equally be the locusfor the development of non-alienated or emancipatory tendencies that can beidentified and sparked through critical sociocultural analysis, among otherthings. This stance is reflected in a constitutive ambivalence all of them haveregarding the everyday, and also (perhaps to a lesser extent) the utopian,albeit in different ways and degrees. At the same time, there are some import-ant differences. Lukács believed that an irredeemably debased everyday lifecould only be transcended through the Messianic figure of Lenin and thedynamo of world communism, while Adorno et al. abandoned any belief inthe possibility of social transformation via the agency of the working class(or any other tangible collective agent, for that matter), and sought out thedying embers of utopian possibility in the individual contemplation of avant-garde cultural and intellectual forms. Benjamin, by contrast, follows Simmelin regarding the objects, images and practices of modern everyday life as satu-rated with broader significances, and as a crucial repository of the collectivedreams of humankind for the realization of a free, egalitarian society,although they are at variance about how such aspirations might be accom-modated within existing capitalist economic relations. Similarly, Hellerargues that it is possible to reflect critically upon the static and routinizedqualities of the modern everyday and transform it, especially through various


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utopian moments (art, philosophy, love) that can function to ‘defamiliarize’reified and particularistic social actions and attitudes. Regardless of suchdifferences and similarities, however, the core idea developed here – that theeveryday is permeated with political and ideological qualities, and constitutesthe crucial terrain for both the exercise of domination and ‘utopic’ resistancesto it – is one that continues to resonate in critical social thought to this day.

NOTES

1 Of course, this grouping by no means exhausts the list of theorists and intellec-tual traditions that attend critically to the everyday, but for reasons of space andintellectual continuities could not be included here. For example, there arestrictly Freudian approaches (Brown, 1973; Mowitt, 2002), a tradition that isrooted in Surrealism and French Marxism (ffrench, 2004; Gardiner, 1995), theRussian approach of Mikhail Bakhtin (Gardiner, 2003; Morson and Emerson,1990), and so forth. Book-length monographs synthesizing these various criticalapproaches can be found in Gardiner (2000) and Highmore (2002a), while astudy that applies some of these theories to more empirical phenomena can befound in Moran (2005).

2 See Gardiner (1995, 2004); also Maycroft (1996, 1999); Shields (1999).3 Such ambivalence is reflected in a great deal of ambiguity within Marxism, and

contemporary social thought more generally, as to what actually constitutes‘everyday life’ (see Crook, 1998). As Highmore (2002b: 5), has pointed out, oneof the central points of disagreement in the literature is whether the everydayinvolves primarily individual acts and particularistic, subjective attitudes, or elseconforms to some sort of overarching structure that is shared by a large groupof people.

4 Of course, the process of modernization has come to embrace the entire globe,although very unevenly and with differential and often contradictory effects. Foran excellent study of how modernity affected daily life in the capitalist peripheryduring the first few decades of the 20th century, and how local intellectualtraditions dealt with this experience, see Harootunian (2000).

5 Good examples would be the existential phenomenology of Martin Heideggerand the aesthetic provocations of the Surrealists. As to the former, in Being andTime (1962), Heidegger considered the everyday world to be ‘fallen’, because itwas not attuned to the truth of ‘Being’. ‘Authentic’ existence would have to belocated in elements that contradicted the mundanity and habitualized repetitive-ness of the everyday – in the contemplation of death, for instance. For their part,the Surrealists evoked the ‘marvellous’ as an escape from or transcendence ofeveryday life. This prompted Lefebvre to argue that while the Surrealists under-stood that daily life was routinized and degraded, they failed to realize that thiswas for distinct sociohistorical reasons. For Lefebvre, the notion of the ‘marvel-lous’ therefore expressed a ‘transcendental contempt for the real’ (1991: 29),which meant that Surrealism reinforced rather than overcame the perennialseparation between spirit and matter, ideal and reality, utopia and the everyday.


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6 Bloch (1986: 146). Moran does, however, discuss the work of Lefebvre in relationto these events, especially the latter’s theory of the ‘moment’, which, as has beennoted elsewhere, is very similar to Bloch’s novum. On this, see Gardiner (1995:118); Shields (1999: 61).

7 For more of the notion of ‘constellation’, understood as a juxtaposition ofrelational themes and elements rather than a unified field with respect to thestudy of the history of ideas, see Jay (1993).

8 A similar argument can be found in Levitas (1990), although a counter-positionis articulated by Webb (2000).

9 Messianism refers to a belief in ‘end-time’; that is, the culmination, fulfilment ornegation of history in a manner that transforms present-day conditions and ushersin a radically different form of human existence (see Olson, 1982). However, it isimportant not to overstate the influence of Jewish theology here; at the very least,such ideas had something of an ‘elective affinity’ with the processes of capitalistmodernity (see Löwy, 1992).

10 Curiously, this anticipates Baudrillard’s argument about the ‘silent majority’,wherein the masses are so inured to alienation that it is simply the normal stateof affairs under postmodernism (see Baudrillard, 1983). I have not addressed herethe usefulness of the concept of ‘alienation’ per se under contemporary socialconditions, which of course many postmodernists have disputed. Suffice to saythat a strong argument can be made for its continuing relevance. Gottdienersuggests, for instance, that critical theory requires reference to some notion of‘alienation’ or its analogues (see Gottdiener, 1996).

11 See Ganguly (2004); McCracken (2002). In fact, Benjamin’s critique of Surreal-ism has significant parallels with Lefebvre’s. See n. 5.

12 On the positive features of the habitualization of everyday life, see Felski(1999/2000), but also Gardiner (2004).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

MICHAEL E. GARDINER is a full professor in Sociology at the University ofWestern Ontario. His books include the edited four-volume collectionMikhail Bakhtin (Sage, 2003) in the Sage ‘Masters of Modern Social Thought’series, Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and theHuman Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, coedited with Michael M. Bell),and The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology(Routledge, 1992), as well as numerous articles dedicated to dialogical theory,ethics, everyday life and utopianism published in such journals as History ofthe Human Sciences, Theory, Culture & Society, Theory and Society, andUtopian Studies. Most recently he has coedited (with Gregory J. Seigworth)a special double issue on ‘everyday life’ for the journal Cultural Studies(18[2–3], [March–May 2004]), with the title Rethinking Everyday Life: AndNothing Turned Itself Inside Out.

Address: Professor Michael E. Gardiner, Department of Sociology, SocialScience Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, CanadaN6A 5C2. [email: [email protected]]


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marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everydayfriedrich engels, then stretches to georg...

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