John Roberts: Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory.

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

Pluto Press, 2006, 147 PP.

ISBN 0-745-32410-X (pbk) 16 [pounds sterling]

John Roberts's * slim book aims at nothing less than recovering the 'dangerous memory' of everyday life as a category of total revolutionary praxis from its recuperation by cultural studies. In order to do so, he reconstitutes a political sequence from 1917-1975, marked by three key moments: the October revolution, the 1945 anti-fascist liberation, and the worldwide anti-hegemonic struggles of 1968. Within this sequence, we witness the birth of the concept of everyday life as the site and possibility of revolutionary transformation. This is what Roberts characterises as 'The enculturalization of politics' (p. 11), which is not to be mistaken for the weakening of revolutionary politics (as some forms of classical Marxism might mistake it), but which is its extension and expansion into and across the whole of existence. The end of this sequence is marked by revolutionary defeat and capitalist counter-attack, and the absorption of everyday life into a theory of consumption within cultural studies. Against this abandonment of revolutionary praxis, Roberts insists that the much-abused concept of everyday life, retains a utopian potential that can only be recovered through its rehistoricisation.

The origin of the new revolutionary concept of everyday life is traced from the secularisation of this concept in capitalist modernity. In the moment of the discovery by psychoanalysis of a 'psychopathology of everyday life' and in revolutionary cultural praxis post-1917, we find, according to Roberts, 'the disinvestments of cultural theory and the human sciences from the metaphysics of tragedy' (p. 19). Everyday life no longer represents the fallen world, the domain of inauthentic existence, as it did for Kierkegaard and would do for Heidegger. Instead, a new dialectical understanding of everyday life becomes possible, in which it stages both the alienations of capitalism and the possibilities of resistance against the commodity form. In this genealogy the work of Lukacs is crucial, since it sets the terms of the debate, despite its lack of a concept of everyday life. Moving, in his 1920s works, from a romantic anti-capitalism under the impact of the events of the October revolution, Lukacs sets out a detailed analysis of both the effects of commodity fetishism and the nature of revolutionary self-consciousness. Although still marred by a certain utopianism, because the proletariat apparently completes the dialectic of German idealism, Lukacs's work also opens a hermeneutics of the everyday, which would be elaborated in the debates of the 1920s and 1930s.

The reference point for these debates is, of course, the experience in the Soviet Union. Here, the revolutionary transformation of everyday life was put into practice through the unstable combination of the efforts of the Bolsheviks, the workers and peasants themselves, and the artistic avant-garde. As Roberts points out, this transformation took place under the aegis of a 'machino-technism', or what we could call the 'Taylorisation of everyday life'. The utopian desire of the revolution was transmogrified into capitalist accumulation and industrialisation. In her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), Susan Buck-Morss notes the paradox that 'for the proletariat of the Soviet Union industrialization was still a dream-world when, for workers in capitalist countries, it was already lived catastrophe' (2002: 105). It was the avant-garde of productivism and constructivism that would push the logic of this 'machinic' dreamworld to its limit, offering in the process an internal critique of its failure to transcend capital. Roberts recovers a missing figure from the history of the concept of everyday life: the Russian theorist of productivism, Boris Arvatov. In his essays, Arvatov explicitly articulated a theory of everyday life as revolutionary praxis--a theory animated by the utopian desire to dissolve the separate realm of art. Rather than simply being concerned with raising the level of material production, Arvatov suggests the possibility of continually evolving social being through the supersession of everyday life. If this was a high point of revolutionary mobilisation, Roberts traces the effects of its waning under the impact of reactionary forces (Stalinism, Nazism and fascism, and capitalist cultural development). In this type of situation, the everyday as a site of revolutionary praxis is decoupled from the hermeneutics of the everyday, with hermeneutics gaining preeminence. This can be seen in the work of Walter Benjamin, who was so influenced by the experiments of the Soviet avant-garde. The advantage of Benjamin's work is not only his interrogation of the everyday 'dream-worlds' of capitalism, notably in the (anti-)monumental Arcades project, but also his revelation of the sedimented temporalities at work in the everyday. As Roberts indicates, this complex articulation of time 'makes it difficult, therefore, to talk about Benjamin's work strictly in relation to the activist priorities of the philosophy of praxis' (p. 62). The difficulty is that although Benjamin offers an unparalled reading of the intricacies of the experience of everyday life, this tends to make it more resistant to being articulated in terms of revolutionary praxis. It also suggests that there is a more complex narrative at work in Roberts's account of the concept of everyday life. Instead of being a narrative of decline, where what was once a revolutionary concept becomes reduced to a theory of consumption by cultural studies, it is more that the concept of the everyday is always haunted by the fact that a hermeneutics of the everyday can easily become detached from the everyday as a site of revolutionary praxis.

Therefore, it is not enough to put faith in the concept; but it is necessary to explore how it can be articulated as a concept of revolutionary praxis, and also how this articulation fails. The tension between hermeneutics and praxis is evident in Roberts's account of the postwar development of the concept in France. Via Benjamin, Roberts suggests that the account of the everyday as an inassimilable remainder can be traced back to the philosophy of Schelling. Unlike Hegel's totalisations, Schelling's philosophy suggests a fundamental non-identity or disunity of consciousness, leaving a remainder to reason. This non-identity is then found incarnated in everyday life as what remains largely beneath philosophical attention and, also, is resistant to being taken up by philosophy. The resistance of everyday life to philosophy is traced out into the work of Lefebvre, Barthes, Blanchot, the Situationists, and de Certeau. Lefebvre is obviously the figure who has provided the most detailed theorisation of the everyday, as well as bridging the three key moments of 1917, 1945 and 1968. He is poised between the inter-war dialectical reading, retaining his faith in the Marxist 'total man', and the postwar emphasis on the everyday as remainder. Whereas Blanchot pushes towards the concept of the remainder, leaving revolutionary subjectivity behind, Lefebvre retains this dialectical tension. Roberts suggests two solutions to this tension. The first is that of the Situationists, who relaunch the coupling of the hermeneutic of everyday life to revolutionary praxis in a new fusion. This re-synthesis is named, in Roberts's felicitous phrase, 'daily insurgency' (p. 80). Here there is no distinction between cultural critique and praxis, as each feeds and informs the other.

The other solution, which has been successful at the level of the academic institution, is that offered by Michel de Certeau. While the Situationists transmuted the remainder into revolutionary subjectivity, de Certeau decouples cultural critique from praxis in order to pursue the activities of the 'creative consumer'. De Certeau's works, published in 1974, offer an account of resistant subjectivity, but one that remains internal to the capitalist order. Alongside the newly nascent 'post-structuralism' (as it would be named in the Anglo-American context), de Certeau focuses on the micropolitics of subversion detached from any more global revolutionary identity. In doing so, his work reveals the tension we have already noted, as Roberts states: 'de Certeau's work could be said to finally bring into systematic theoretical visibility, as a determinate cultural practice, the split in early Western Marxism between the philosophy of praxis and a hermeneutics of the everyday' (p. 91). We might see here a similarity to the case of Benjamin, whose 'hermeneutics' has also been heavily taken up within cultural studies. This fracture in Benjamin's work produces the interplay between readings that depoliticise his work, classically Gershom Scholem's theological reading (2003), and those, like Esther Leslie's (200), which have argued for a re-politicised Marxist Benjamin. Roberts's rehistoricisation of the everyday is committed to the necessary aim of exploring it as the site of multiple mediations, while also insisting on the necessity of its transformation and abolishment (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung). The history he tells is not, as it might first appear, a simple narrative of a revolutionary concept eventually betrayed by academic entrepreneurs. Instead, in relation to class struggle and anti-hegemonic interventions, the everyday itself is a place of struggle to articulate a hermeneutics of the everyday with revolutionary praxis. Perhaps the example of the Situationist International is instructive here. Without the benefit of hindsight, their fusion of this hermeneutics with revolutionary praxis could only appear quixotic in the context of 1950s and early 1960s France. What may well be required is some of their intransigent prescriptiveness coupled, as Roberts convincingly argues, to a more nuanced understanding of the everyday in terms of cultural, technical, and artistic forms. In this way, the rehistoricisation of the everyday would not be another academic exercise of recovery, but the possibility of awakening what Roberts calls 'the promissory space of total revolutionary praxis' (p. 123).

Bibliography

Buck-Morss, S. (2002) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press).

Leslie, E. (2000) Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto Press). Scholem, G. (2003) Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans.

Harry Zohn (New York Review Books).

* The John Roberts who is the author of this book is based at the University of Wolverhampton and has published work on Marxist critiques of art, including The Philistine Controversy, co-authored with Dave Beech. He is not to be confused with John Michael Roberts of Brunel University, whose work has been previously published in Capital & Class.