Marxism and The Convergence of Utopia and The Everyday

01 066539 Gardiner (bc-t) 11/7/06 11:33 am Page 1
H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S 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]
Marxism and the convergence

of utopia and the everyday
MICHAEL E. GARDINER
ABSTRACT
The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life
and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a
complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some
of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their
convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition),
in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and
semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in
the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg
Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as
mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating
most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is
inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique
what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of
daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also
attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame
terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday
utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes
of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present
to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the
everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has
bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions.
Key words defamiliarization, everyday life, Marxism,
modernity, phenomenology, utopia
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2 H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S 19(3)
INTRODUCTION
The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and

utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and
often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical
filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming
mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the
more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theoriza-
tion. This lineage originates, logically enough, in the work of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic
Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg
Simmel, who could in many respects be described as a ‘para-Marxist’, at least
in methodological and analytical terms), and culminating most recently in the
work of Agnes Heller.1 Such an approach is characterized by certain distinc-
tive preoccupations. First, any discussion of ‘everyday life’, in the context of
a non-economistic, critical and reflexive Marxism, is inseparable from a
project that seeks to unveil and criticize what it takes to be the debased,
routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of
modern capitalist society. Part and parcel of the latter is the desire to locate
certain utopian or emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain. This
orientation can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. By
‘everyday utopianism’, I mean a theoretical position that imagines utopia not
as an ideal society located in some romanticized past ‘Golden Age’, or in
some 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 daily
existence.2
Such an expression might not, at first glance, appear to be an especially
felicitous one, in so far as ‘utopia’ and ‘everyday life’ are usually construed
as incongruous, even thoroughly incompatible phenomena. Moreover, the
suggestion that this group of sometimes disparate thinkers constitutes a
‘tradition’ in the generally accepted sense of the term is open to debate. In
countering these objections, my position is, first, that there does exist a
strong and hitherto neglected connection between these two concepts; and
second, that whatever their ostensive differences, these thinkers have tended
to focus on a series of remarkably similar concerns and issues. Some of the
latter include: (1) the limitations and pitfalls of what we could term ‘abstract
utopianism’, 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 of
utilizing this knowledge for the practical amelioration of current social
conditions, but without falling into the trap of fetishizing the concrete or the
immediate (Ireland, 2002); (3) the notion that genuine human sociality exists

MARXISM, UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY 3
primarily, if not exclusively, outside the formal and repressive structures of

the capitalist state and private or public bureaucracies; (4) a preoccupation
with such phenomena as the body, desire, sensuality and play, and with the
role these might take in any genuinely transformative political project. For
the theorists discussed here, the ordinary can become extraordinary not by
eclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can leap beyond it arbitrarily to some
‘higher’ level of cognition, knowledge or action, but by fully appropriating
and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, within
it. Such an enriched experience can then be redirected back to daily life in
order to transform it. The overarching goal is, in the words of Kaplan and
Ross, to elevate ‘lived experience to the status of a critical concept – not merely
in order to describe lived experience, but in order to change it’ (Kaplan and
Ross, 1987: 1).
The second thing that must be noted here is that, as a direct result of this
expressly political stance, each of the major figures of this Central European
Marxist 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 given
thinker varies considerably.3 Further, such a dialectical ambivalence is
reflected in a preoccupation with historical transformations vis-à-vis
everyday life, especially as this concerns the transition from a premodern to
modern society (the latter of which, as Henri Lefebvre argued, can itself be
subdivided into a number of successive, although unevenly developed, stages
– which, for some, would shade into the postmodern) (Lefebvre, 1984). This
historical perspective involves the task of understanding how capitalist
economic realities, especially the dominance of the commodity-form and the
intersection of work, leisure and domestic life, have shaped day-to-day social
life. But it is also concerned with the ways in which the culture of modernity
and the process of modernization more generally have insinuated themselves
in the everyday, at the same time transforming its utopian potentialities. This
pertains to such phenomena as the secularization and rationalization of the
social world; the condensation of time and space through emerging tech-
nologies of transportation and communications; the demise of relatively
stable, premodern identities and the concomitant growth of individualism
and social fragmentation; a pervasive urbanization process; and the concen-
tration and centralization of political power, institutional structures and
capital, to name only the most salient factors.4 Hence, for the Marxist
tradition discussed here, everyday life cannot simply be taken for granted: it
must be ‘problematized’, rendered strange or unfamiliar, in order to grasp
how it is mediated by a wide range of sociocultural, political and economic
factors, and also to make visible its latently utopian characteristics. Although
there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of
these writers, it can be argued that the key insight they present to us is the

need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent

and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of
many other theorists and intellectual traditions.5
Perhaps a useful way to bring the notion of ‘everyday utopianism’ into
sharper relief with respect to its central elements and hermeneutical possi-
bilities, and in a perhaps less abstract way than sketched out above, might be
to discuss briefly Joe Moran’s recent article ‘November in Berlin: the End of
the Everyday’. Here, Moran examines a specific historical conjuncture: the
postwar division of Germany into Eastern and Western sectors, which
involved very different models of political organization and economic
development (as filtered by Cold War rivalries and attitudes), culminating in
the physical construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Although these were
deeply traumatic events for the German national psyche, they eventually
became absorbed and sedimented into the everyday rhythms and routines of
life in the GDR in particular: ‘Within the context of a daily life that was
grudgingly accepted as inevitable, the Wall simply became part of the scenery’
(Moran, 2004: 218). The momentous political events of November 1989 and
subsequent breaching of the Wall suddenly dissolved such ‘normalizing’ and
typically opaque daily habits and rituals. The smooth, linear continuum of
official historical narratives was effectively shattered, the essentially contin-
gent openness of the world-historical process was affirmed, and a myriad of
dizzying new possibilities for ‘changing life’ suddenly hove into view.
Benumbed by decades of endless queuing for scarce and often non-existent
necessities, unfulfilling work routines, bureaucratic surveillance and the
pervasive micro-management and politicization of everyday life, East
Berliners overwhelmed befuddled and suddenly helpless border guards, and,
among other carnivalesque happenings, ‘Trabi drivers produced an
impromptu, atonal horn concerto, and pedestrians pushed champagne
through the windows and banged on the roofs. In West Berlin, huge, snaking
queues formed outside the sex shops (banned in the East) and the banks where
Ossis 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 utopian
possibilities. And, although Moran does not refer to his ideas directly, the
‘pregnant pause’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall might be interpreted as an
excellent example of what the German Marxist and theorist of utopia Ernst
Bloch called the novum (Bloch, 1986: 146).6 By this, Bloch meant the periodic
irruption of the radically new into the apparently stable and eternal, and it is
the appearance of the novum, in however fleeting or mystified a fashion, that
circumvents 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

possibilities, and hence constitutes a kind of ‘pre-cognition’, an anticipatory

illumination of transformed conditions. Bloch argues that the novum is an
expression of what he refers to as the ‘concrete utopia’, which is marked by
a structural isomorphism between the ‘potency of human hope’ and the
actual 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 unmediated
promise of fulfillment, as the content of metaphysical wonder (Staunen). [In]
contrast to all “abstract,” “static,” “undialectical” utopias, concrete utopia is
a processual utopia, grounded in immanently developing tendencies working
out in the presence of something better’ (Hudson, 1982: 100).
A cynical response to Moran’s account might be that in their apparent
supplication 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 in
both obvious and more subtle ways. Moran does point out that not long after
the events of November 1989, East Berliners settled into newly reconstituted
patterns of daily life that, in many respects, were just as routinized and resist-
ant to radical reflexivity as previous ones. For instance, although the Wall
was dismantled and marked only by a line in the pavement, in the course of
their daily activities most Berliners were oblivious to this marker, which was
so immediately visible, and so fraught with symbolic weight, to visitors and
tourists. But Moran is also keen to underscore the possibility that the
responses of East Berliners cannot be so easily written off as the simple
bedazzlement of the stonewashed masses by the consumer plenitude of the
West. Quite apart from the fact that reactions by East Berliners were multi-
farious and not uniform, there were also indications of a ‘rediscovered
quotidian’, a desire for ecstatic communality and popular celebration that
could not be entirely coopted and commodified by the capitalist imperatives
of the West. Although such expressions are often much more modest and
pragmatic than those envisaged by the more radical exponents of the critique
of 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 neutralized
or commodified, and thereby function as a ‘palliative ideology’, other
utopian configurations are equally rooted in the actual dynamics of history
and can still be brought to fruition. Indeed, this is related to what Bloch calls
the ‘cultural surplus’ of utopian dreaming, which can never be fully contained
ideologically or negated by the status quo. Such a surplus can continue to
generate new constellations of meaning and significances in times well
beyond our own. The ‘dream of a better life’, writes Bloch, ‘reaches into each

kind of cultural anticipation. Each plan and each form driven to the limits of
perfection came in contact with utopia and gave, particularly to the great
works 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 buried
deep 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 as
Marxism, 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 what
follows, I will discuss the attempt by this Central European Marxist tradition
to grapple with this notion of ‘everyday utopianism’. I present these ideas in
the chronological order of each individual thinker’s intervention, mainly
because each was aware of previous work, and each tried to update and build
upon the achievements of his or her predecessors in a manner that gives these
ideas a rough coherence, albeit taking the form of a Benjaminian ‘constella-
tion’ rather than some sort of systematic or overarching unity.7 What I hope
to demonstrate is that Marxist theory has much of value to tell us about
everyday 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 can

be seen clearly in the writings of Marx himself, as well as those of his close
collaborator, Engels. Marx, as is well known, wanted to combat the abstrac-
tions of his German idealist predecessors, predominantly Hegel, as well as
the no less abstract and reductive materialism of Feuerbach and other such
pretenders to Hegel’s throne. To this end, Marx admonishes us to turn our
thoughts away from arcane theological and philosophical debates in order to
grasp actual social practices and relationships, as these are located in the
sphere of daily existence. To focus exclusively on rarified ideas, or on
‘man[sic, and passim]-in-general’, was not only to misunderstand profoundly
the true nature of human beings and their social relations. It was, in his
opinion, to contribute actively to the enslavement of the working class in
alienated conditions of existence that were almost entirely beyond their
understanding or control. So convinced was Marx of this that he typically
construed the phenomenon of ‘ideology’ as a body of representations that
functioned to deflect attention away from the realities of concrete social life

toward a realm of spectral abstractions and idealizations (Larrain, 1983). In

the realm of ideology, he reasoned, real socio-economic contradictions and
conflicts were ‘solved’ at the level of the imaginary or fantastical. This notion
is rendered most explicitly in an early text that remained unpublished in
Marx’s and Engels’s lifetime, The German Ideology, where it is argued that
capitalist social relations encourage a systematic misunderstanding of the
world and our place in it, through a process of inversion or reversal. In
evoking the famous metaphor of the ‘camera obscura’, Marx and Engels
sought to argue that such ideological transpositions prompt social actors to
attribute the determination of history and society wholly to ideas, and the
philosophical or religious systems that correspond to them, rather than to
the social organization of economic production, thereby buttressing the
prevailing system of class division and exploitation. For Marx, the critique
of ideology could not remain on the level of rarefied philosophical debate; it
had to be rooted in an understanding of the specific material conditions that
fostered ‘consciousness and its products’, together with the practical trans-
formation of the material conditions of class society, so as to allow people to
realize themselves in free, conscious activity: ‘Human emancipation will only
be 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 and
Engels, 1978: 46).
Marx expanded on his initial theory of ideology in the famous short
chapter in vol. I of Capital entitled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the
Secret Thereof’. Here, he argues that capitalism has transformed personal
worth into exchange value. The result is that the so-called ‘cash nexus’
mediates all human activities and interactions, and trumps other, more
qualitative sociocultural values and interests. But this has a positive side: by
stripping away all semblance of past tradition and religious beliefs, of senti-
mentality and bourgeois talk of ‘morality’, modernity has forced human
beings to come to grips with their actual conditions of life. Unfortunately,
the potential for this kind of sober and realistic assessment of the world is
blocked by the cognitive dislocation encouraged by the fetishism of the
commodity. Marx theorizes that the commodity-form, whether it be a table,
toothbrush or shoe, induces a kind of ‘collective amnesia’ with regard to its
origins. Although he is vague as to the actual psychological mechanisms
involved, Marx suggests that the spontaneous ‘common sense’ generated by
capitalism prevents us from looking beyond the surface appearance of the
commodity so as to grasp the underlying socio-economic relations that, in
reality, 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.

Marx’s brief remarks contain an implicit psychology: custom sets

routines, for which we use ‘obvious’ commonplace notions, but these
notions drive from awareness the full nature of these routines.
Billig suggests that Marx’s remarkable insight here is not followed up with a
coherent explanation of how mundane routines of economic intercourse
bolster this kind of ‘amnesia’ on a day-to-day basis, apart from implying that
commodity fetishism operates in a quasi-Freudian way to ‘repress’ (or at least
sublimate) a conscious awareness of the realities of capitalism (ibid.: 314).
However, Marx does make it clear that it is not only in the mundane
consciousness of people that this bedazzlement by surface appearances and
the resultant social ‘forgetting’ is located. It is found equally in all manner of
scholarly doctrines, such as bourgeois economics (which also fails manifestly
to 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 social
life under capitalism towards various fanciful abstractions, fetishes and
hobby-horses, they play a crucial role in the legitimation of class domination.
The ‘cure’ for such pathology involves the decisive rejection of the supposed
autonomy of ideas, and the pursuit of sociohistorical research into the
production and reproduction of human life. In opposition to the pseudo-
science of positivism et al., Marx argued that genuine science had to penetrate
the realm of surface appearance to grasp the underlying constitutive relations
and 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 the
everyday and its contradictions, moves them to a higher level of conceptual-
ization and understanding, and then spirals back to the concrete to reproduce
in thought a ‘rich totality of many determinations’ (Marx, 1989: 44).
It is at this point where Marx’s ambivalent stance towards the everyday
comes to a head. For him, we cannot ignore or trivialize the everyday, because
daily life is where humanity’s essential powers and ‘species-activity’ is located,
expressed and finally realized. Yet, we also need to understand capitalist
modernity as a complex, historically situated totality, with the practical goal
of ending the systematic oppressions and alienations of class society and
appropriating fully the wealth of human potentialities. We require a dialecti-
cal science that neither ‘primly abstracts’ from the real nature of human
activity, nor remains entangled in ‘false appearance and deception, [the]
personification of things and the reification of production relations, this
religion of everyday life’ (Marx, 1967: 830). Everyday life is both the cause of
and prophylactic for mystified and fetishized social relations, something to be
celebrated, but also criticized and ultimately transfigured. But there are two

further things to understand about Marx’s treatment of the everyday: first,

breaking through the alienations and reifications induced by capitalist social
relations and the commodity-form through the medium of class struggle will
release 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 collapsing
society itself is pregnant’ (Marx and Engels, 1980: 76); secondly, these utopian
forces must be understood in a materialist sense, as something simultaneously
rooted in present-day sociohistorical circumstances yet desperately at odds
with them. In other words, the critique of idealism not only concerns how
our experience and understanding of the everyday are distorted ideologically
and misappropriated, as they are in bourgeois economics; it must be extended
to the criticism of idealist modes of utopian thinking as well. A convincing
argument can be made that in repudiating abstract or idealist utopias, Marx
did not seek to embrace a kind of naïve empiricism and dispense with utopian-
ism tout court. As Geoghegan suggests persuasively, what is under attack in
Marx is not anticipation or utopian expressions as such, but ‘rather the failure
to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential
dynamics of capitalism’ (Geoghegan, 1987: 27).8 But it did mean that he
struggled with the nature and significance of utopia, no less than that of
everyday 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 20th
century. Arguably, Georg Lukács is the key figure in this context. Before
discussing his contribution, however, a short detour through the ideas of the
German social thinker Georg Simmel is required.
SIMMEL: THE ‘TECHNOLOGY OF METROPOLITAN

LIFE’
Georg Simmel was an oddball genius and a prolific, wide-ranging thinker

who blurred the lines between various academic genres and styles of exposi-
tion (Simmel, 1987). Despite periodic flashes of interest in his work, he
remained a marginal figure within German intellectual life during his lifetime.
Nevertheless, Simmel had an enormous impact on an entire generation of
Central European scholars, including such luminaries as Benjamin, Ernst
Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim and Lukács,
not least because many of them attended his seminars at Berlin University
before the First World War. Lukács himself referred to Simmel as ‘the most
important 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 and
Engels and the western Marxists with respect to the understanding of

everyday utopianism. Although Marx did formulate initially the theories of

alienation and commodity fetishism, he tended to focus on how these related
to capitalist economic processes. Simmel, by contrast, sought to grasp
modernity as a distinct sociocultural formation that transformed daily exist-
ence, engendered a wide range of new affective and sensory effects, and
opened up new possibilities for living. And, although Simmel never explic-
itly declared himself a Marxist, it is nonetheless clear that in suggesting that
his sociology builds ‘another storey beneath historical materialism’, he saw
no essential contradiction between the tenets of Marx and his more cultur-
alist and social-psychological orientation.
Simmel is important because he developed an innovative phenomenology
of culture that sought to grasp how the diverse practices, spaces and objects
in an urbanized everyday life manifested latent significances (Goodstein,
2002). As he argued in his 1900 masterwork The Philosophy of Money, the
diagnostician of modernity can find in each particle of daily life ‘the totality
of 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’ of
life, and relates them to their intellectual and historical contexts. For Simmel,
accordingly, to study the everyday is analogous to the microscopic analysis
of cells in biology. Just as with their biological counterparts, social ‘cells’
interact with each other continuously, in the innumerable fleeting and more
enduring interactions that make up day-to-day city life. But although he
detects a connection between the micro- and macroscopic in such myriad
details, he does not counsel us merely to glimpse the societal whole in each
of its component parts, because the everyday must also be understood in situ.
‘[To] the adequately trained eye the totality of beauty, the complete meaning
of the world as a whole, radiates from every single point’, as Simmel writes
(1968: 69). He sought to understand the very ‘everydayness’ of mundane
social existence, not to only see in the objects and passing moments of daily
life a sign of something ‘deeper’ or more ‘fundamental’. Simmel’s methodol-
ogy is therefore rigorously anti-reductionist: like each spot of light and
colour in a kaleidoscope that reveals a hidden pattern when brought into
correct alignment, his ‘sociological impressionism’ privileges neither the
isolated detail nor the abstract system. Rather, each is part of a mutually
revealing interpretive dialectic that produces ‘snapshots’ of everyday life in
the 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, but
rather to develop a new and more innovative style of sociological exposition
better suited to the experience of modernity. The result is that Simmel’s
various excurses into the culture of the modern everyday approximate
Clifford Geertz’s call for the ‘thick description’ of sociocultural existence as
it is actually lived and felt (Geertz, 1973).

Simmel’s desire to develop a new method and style of sociological writing

was animated by his proto-existentialist concern for the fate of human
freedom and ethics in the context of modernity. This brings us to the notion
of the ‘tragedy of culture’, which has proven to be enormously influential
within western Marxism. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel suggests that,
under capitalism, the products of culture are separated from practical human
activity, 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 becomes
separated from human subjectivity, and the scope for individual autonomy
and creativity becomes severely attenuated. This is the tragedy and conun-
drum of modern life: that although ultimately the product of active human
praxis, the world we create is presented to us as something bereft of intrin-
sic meaning and coherence, and hence often as alien and threatening. The
reifications induced by the money economy clearly weighed on Simmel’s
ethical sensibilities. Capitalist rationalization not only results in the alien-
ation of the individual producer from the object, as Marx noted; it also
encourages the transformation of human subjectivity into what Simmel
describes as ‘cool reserve and anonymous objectivity’. We can flourish in
dense urban settings because we are largely indifferent to the fate of those
around us, and we do this by shaping our psyche in line with the sort of
calculating mentality demanded by a money- and commodity-based
economy. As Simmel puts it, ‘one may characterize the intellectual functions
that are used at present in coping with the world and in regulating both indi-
vidual and social relations as calculative functions’ (Frisby, 1984: 108). This
is so not least because, under modernity, human purpose and action are
mediated increasingly by objects, rather than other people, and technical
considerations of efficiency and narrowly goal-oriented behaviour tend to
supplant relationships of an ethical and qualitative nature. In particular,
Simmel is fascinated by the extent to which money, although the ultimate
symptom and symbol of human reification, becomes the common substra-
tum of value for virtually all social actors. Because it can be converted into
any commodity imaginable, money has a dehumanizing effect; to paraphrase
Marx, money transcends things like inherited status or even natural ability,
and can make the ugly person beautiful, the dullard fascinating. Yet, money
also has strangely egalitarian effects. In so far as it is the generality that
mediates all particularity, the crucial nexus that binds modern society
together, money can be the means through which a near infinity of human
needs 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 diverse
contents imaginable, a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’, making
possible ever-changing material realities, experiences and world-views.

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 and
individuals we interact with on a daily basis, and the compression of time and
space through various modernizing and technological processes, mean that
everyday life in the contemporary city is marked by a constant bombardment
of the senses. But the results are contradictory: along with overstimulation
and the blasé attitude that is an adaptive response to it, comes an inestimable
richness and variety of objects and experiences. Modern urban ‘nomadism’
does bring with it negative consequences, such as the breakdown of
traditional social support networks, or the demise of the sort of existential
and cosmological certitudes of the past. And, certainly, we all have to adjust
to the abstract and quantitative aspects of mass urban existence. However, in
exactly how any given individual adapts to these conditions, there is much
leeway: the very universality and objectivity of modern existence allow for
the cultivation of a wide range of subjective orientations, thereby encourag-
ing ‘qualitative differences’ between diverse groups and persons that had not
existed previously. Modernity frees up hitherto repressed human potentials,
encourages a broader and more cosmopolitan outlook and breaks down the
stultifying 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 the
general ‘aestheticization’ of daily existence under modernity (Featherstone,
1992).
Simmel’s work was largely compatible with Marxism on the level of broad
theories and concepts, but his political sympathies were always more
reformist than radical (Leck, 2000). He maintained a complex and dialectical
view of modern urban life, juxtaposing positive and negative factors without
ever arriving at some overarching synthesis in which all such tensions and
contradictions are resolved. Yet, on balance, Simmel was relatively upbeat
about the prospects for humanity under modernity, especially with regard to
the expanding horizons of individual freedom and the possibilities for self-
expression through the aestheticization of daily life. He did not regard
modern society as a utopia per se, but he did feel it was animated by certain
utopian propensities, in that the supersession of tradition raised the possi-
bility of the secular realization of what were once exclusively theological
ideals of plenitude and fulfilment. ‘Modern salvation was achieved when a
person’s being formed a unified whole, radiating a consistent personal style
from an unseen central point. Simmel was making a call for peaceful cultural
anarchy in which freely interacting individuals would not hinder one
another’s self-realization’, writes Harry Liebersohn (1988: 154). In promot-
ing this sort of ‘everyday utopianism’, Simmel showed himself to be resolutely
anti-metaphysical: for him, the possibilities of human freedom had to be

sought in the here and now, in tandem with certain tendencies that were
grounded in the real processes of modernization and that could not be
blithely ignored.
LUKÁCS: ‘RIDDLE OF THE

COMMODITY-STRUCTURE’
It is clear from the preceding discussion that Simmel maintained a relatively

even-handed and dialectical view of everyday life in the modern world and
its utopian possibilities. As such, it may seem strange that when the First
World 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-Heideggerian
sort, by overcoming the ‘tragedy of culture’ he identified with modernity and
the forging of a new German identity rooted in a collective struggle guided
by wholly transcendental, anti-materialistic values. Yet, this was a common
enough position at the time: even the German Social Democratic Party,
which sent delegates to a large European peace conference shortly before the
conflict broke out, voted enthusiastically for war credits, mass conscription
and the extensive militarization of German society. In judging his work as a
whole, however, we can conclude that Simmel was not particularly attracted
to the pessimism and irrationalism of his romanticist contemporaries, and
nor 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 premodern
community, was very widespread at the time. For complex reasons that cannot
be chronicled here (Sayre and Löwy, 1984), a romantic anti-capitalism replete
with strikingly Messianic elements (derived mainly from Jewish theological
sources) played an influential role in European social thought in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.9 It left its mark on the writings of such thinkers as
Tönnies, Troeltsch and Landauer, as well as Lukács – and, albeit in a signifi-
cantly different way, Walter Benjamin. Michael Löwy has identified the two
central features of this Messianic impulse as follows: (1) restoration, a heart-
felt yearning for a lost Edenic paradise or ‘Golden Age’; and (2) utopia, the
desire to re-establish this paradisiacal condition at some future time (Löwy,
1980: 106). This problematic synthesis of conservative and revolutionary
impulses is the defining characteristic of modern Messianism. Only a cata-
strophic transformation of a degraded secular world could reverse humanity’s
fall from a prelapsidarian state of grace and reunite a fractured and tragically
flawed cosmos. Messianism was therefore irrevocably opposed to any form
of reformism or ameliorism. In this aggressively revolutionary form, it

represented a profound challenge to many of the central assumptions of

modernity, especially the Enlightenment faith in the unbroken continuity of
progress 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 that
they 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 that
had destroyed the last vestiges of genuine community. At this time, Lukács
subscribed to an essentially Manichean world-view, which projected a stark
contrast between a debased world of mundane bourgeois existence on the
one hand, and a Platonic realm of absolute values and quasi-existentialist
‘authenticity’ on the other. This dualism was the major source of Lukács’s
tragic vision, which for him entailed a retreat into a highly personalistic
mysticism tempered by bouts of pessimistic despair. However, he did
envisage a partial deliverance from the inauthenticity of everyday life through
aesthetic experience, which contained genuine values and was separate from
the philistine, ‘dishonest’ realities of ordinary existence. Art is a repository
of authenticity not only because it could evoke vividly such past ‘Golden
Ages’ as pre-classical Greece, where there was no dichotomy between self
and world and where meaning was rooted in the organic community, but also
in that it held out the possibility of realizing such a paradisiacal state in the
future (Lukács, 1971a). Ultimately, however, Lukács came to regard such
purely aesthetic solutions to the degraded character of the everyday as unsat-
isfactory. Rather than having his nationalism bolstered by the carnage of the
First World War, as was the case with Simmel, Lukács was extremely
disturbed by the conflict. Finding succour in the apparent triumph of the
1917 Russian Revolution, he came to the conclusion that art, in and of itself,
could not redeem debased social conditions. Whereas his youthful ‘ethical
pessimism’ saw no possible way of broaching the duality between the ‘Is’ of
mundane existence and the ‘Ought’ of idealist philosophy, once Lukács
committed himself to the communist cause, he discovered a tangible agent of
redemption: namely, the revolutionary proletariat. Accordingly, the everyday
was viewed increasingly by Lukács, not so much as a sphere of metaphysi-
cally ‘inauthentic’ existence, but as the primary social terrain wherein class
contradictions were manifested and a militantly anti-capitalist consciousness
might be generated (Roberts, 1999: 18). Influenced by the anarchism and
revolutionary syndicalism of Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxembourg and
George Sorel, Lukács’s idiosyncratic Marxism took on an increasingly apoc-
alyptical character. There was no room for compromise when it came to the
complete supersession of capitalism, mainly because, contra Simmel, there
was nothing faintly worthwhile or redeemable about it, except perhaps as an
incubator of the forces of production necessary for an ‘objective’ leap into

communism. Since capitalism could only be understood as a totalizing

system in which the logic of commodity production seeped into every nook
and cranny of daily existence, it could never be reformed, but only destroyed
root and branch, and replaced entirely by socialism. ‘The real contribution
of the capitalist epoch to the construction of the future consists in its creating
the 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 Class
Consciousness, where Lukács develops an account of reification and alien-
ation derived mainly from his reading of the passage in Marx’s Capital on
commodity fetishism, leavened with Simmel’s musings on the ‘tragedy of
culture’. For Lukács, reification was the ‘necessary, immediate reality of
every person living in capitalist society’ (Lukács, 1971b: 197). In order to
liberate humankind from such mystified beliefs, he argued that it was the
central task of the proletariat to challenge this ‘metaphysical passivity’ by
developing a revolutionary class consciousness and confronting the ossified
structures of bourgeois power. (Exactly how this would happen is not
entirely clear in Lukács’s book, an omission that can be explained by his
essentially anarchistic belief in the masses’ revolutionary spontaneity, a
position 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 a
unified, 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 its
relationship to utopia acquire a definite socio-political content. Yet, at the
same time, they retain the Messianic and eschatological flavour of his earlier
work. The major difference is that the goal of transcending everyday life and
resurrecting genuine community is legitimated by reference to a Marxist, as
opposed to a theological, vocabulary. Simmel, it will be recalled, saw in the
Gesellschaft of urban, capitalist existence the possibility of enhanced personal
freedom and self-expression, in which a successful balance could be achieved
between social interests and individual desires and impulses. For Lukács, by
contrast, the daily life of modernity was so debased that redemption would
only be possible by superseding completely the everyday – or, to be more
precise, by returning to what is essentially a romanticized, non-urban and
pre-capitalist society, in which what Lefebvre called ‘everydayness’ is
conspicuous by its absence. In defining capitalism solely in terms of spiritual
and social decay, rather than as a contradictory social formation containing
both destructive and liberatory forces, and by maintaining the belief that
history would culminate in a revivified Gemeinschaft that reconciled subject
and object, Lukács subscribed to a position that was undialectical and

ahistorical in the extreme. In the words of Harootunian, Lukács manifestly

failed 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 totality
whose behaviour would reveal the impending collapse of the capitalist
mode of production and its social formation. Structures offered entry to
concrete and material reality while experience was often relegated to
ideological reflection. In this sense, the everyday was subsumed under
capitalism and modernity, consciousness and experience frozen in a
reified state that, according to Lukács, only the proletariat – despite
being transformed into the figure of a ‘dehumanized’ commodity
atrophying the ‘soul’ – was still able ‘to rebel against reification.’
(Harootunian, 2000: 71–2)
BENJAMIN: ‘DREAM-HOUSES OF THE

COLLECTIVE’
However flawed, Lukács’s theory of reification paved the way for western
Marxists to understand daily life in the modern world in terms of commod-
ification. To comprehend the everyday, it was realized that we need to
confront 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 picked
up on this notion, and made it an essential part of their studies. As an
example, 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 things
promoted by exchange-value, especially in the form of money, wherein
concrete particulars are homogenized and effectively destroyed. At the same
time, however, the Frankfurt School agreed with Lukács that reification was
all-encompassing, and that ‘false consciousness’ had become so pervasive and
deep-rooted that the oppressed could no longer comprehend their experience
of alienation, much less do anything about it.10 Transitory moments of non-
alienated experience could only be glimpsed furtively in the most avant-garde
of artworks and theoretical reflections – aesthetic and intellectual practices
which, by virtue of their very complexity and symbolic opacity, resisted
absorption into the ‘culture industry’. In abandoning the search for tenden-
cies of progressive social change within everyday life itself, and refusing
Lukács’s Messianic ‘solution’ of seeing in the revolutionary proletariat (and

later the Communist Party) an escape from a routinized and commodified

daily existence, the central thinkers of the Frankfurt School viewed the
everyday as ‘irredeemably pedestrian and commodified’ (Agger, 1998: 142).
This left them little option but to fall back on a Weberian pessimism and
baroque kulturkritik that displayed many elitist and anti-populist tendencies
(Baugh, 1990).
Although a peripheral member of the Frankfurt School who was influenced
strongly by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Benjamin took a very
different path with regard to the question of everyday life and its relation to
utopia. For him, it was the everyday world itself that was open to some
measure of redemption, to positive transformation, although he would hardly
dispute the notion that the highest achievements of art or critical intellectual
enquiry were integral to a fully lived human existence. It may well be the case
that what is repressed in modernity is precisely ‘the force of the prosaic, the
counter-authenticity [of] the texture and rhythm of our daily lives and
decisions, the myriad of minute and careful adjustments that we are ready to
offer in the interests of a habitable world’, as Michael André Bernstein writes
(Bernstein, 1992: 182). Benjamin also knew, however, that everyday life in the
modern world was not completely bereft of emancipatory possibilities.
Although he was not as optimistic as Simmel about modernity, he did believe
that there were always hidden ‘constellations’ of qualitative meaning and
subterranean rumblings of dissent in the margins and interstices of the modern
city. 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 not
entirely overshadowed by the logic of the commodity-form. For instance,
Benjamin thought that boredom was a peculiarly modern refusal to conform
to the omnipresent compulsion to consume passively an ever-expanding range
of 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 and
wide-ranging writings, he rarely evokes the term ‘everyday life’ or theorizes
about it explicitly, as others have noted (Osborne, 1995: 180; Roberts, 1999:
21). Yet, it is equally apparent that a preoccupation with daily existence
constitutes something of a leitmotiv for Benjamin, especially in his later
writings. This orientation was precipitated at least in part by his encounter
with 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 of
Nazism in the early 1930s. Benjamin’s project can therefore be read as a
‘heterogeneous project for rescuing the everyday life of modernity from
silence’, as Highmore neatly puts it (Highmore, 2002a: 61). Part and parcel
of this ‘heterogeneous project’ involves assessing the nature of human
experience and the ways it has been transformed in the wake of capitalist

modernization, but also how the everyday had been ignored or disabused by
most western philosophical traditions. As to the latter, although it had
undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of individual freedom and
critical 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. By
contrast, Benjamin argues that myriad passions, affects and epiphanies are as
much a part of the ‘systematic continuum’ of human experience as our
capacity for rational thought. The alternative to the Enlightenment tendency
to project abstract standards of truth on to the world is to try to close the
gap between representation and the sensuously experiential, to understand
the world in theoretical terms, but to not lose sight of the concreteness of
things, their literal ‘everydayness’. It is also worth noting that Benjamin was
transfixed by Brecht’s dictum that ‘truth is concrete’, and best expressed
through the vehicle of ‘coarse thoughts’, which direct theory toward practice.
This preference for the concrete is also evidenced in Benjamin’s affinity for
the oral medium, in so far as he privileges the mimetic power of spoken
language, what Barthes (1977) called the ‘grain of the voice’, over its strictly
communicative or semiotic function. Benjamin not only sought to come to
grips with lived experience in conceptual terms: he also conveys the bodily
and the experiential through his very style of written expression. As Anson
Rabinbach (1979: 11) asserts, Benjamin’s prose ‘attempts to restore the
various dimensions of the sensual through its direct and transparent
expression, which constantly evokes a world in which both the sensuous and
non-sensuous correspondences are manifest. [It] is perhaps the most visual
and corporeal philosophical prose we possess.’
Benjamin’s approach here has many similarities with Simmel’s focus on the
everyday minutiae of capitalist modernity. He agrees with Simmel that the
exploration 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 shapes
human psychology, bodies and social interactions. As mentioned above,
Simmel argues that the continuous rush and tumult of life in the capitalist
metropolis bombards the human sensory apparatus, to which individuals
adapt psychologically by developing a ‘blasé’ attitude of emotional distance
and self-interested, rational calculation. Benjamin (1968: 176) largely agrees
with this, but places considerably more emphasis on how capitalist industri-
alization and routinization effectively re-engineer the human psyche and
corporeal habitus. Mechanization and repetitive motion become a generalized
metaphor for life under modernity, and are not simply about the labour
process per se. ‘The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd’,
writes Benjamin, ‘corresponds to what the worker “experiences” at his

machine.’ For Benjamin, people’s actions in both their working and everyday
lives have become increasingly automatized and more ‘massified’, constitut-
ing an ‘amorphous crowd of passers-by’, rather than a true community. Such
a ‘mass’ consists of people uniformly similar in dress, use of facial expressions
and spoken idioms: they are more interchangeable, yet at the same time, like
Schopenhauer’s porcupines, increasingly isolated from each other. Nonethe-
less, the basic idea is the same in the respective writings of Simmel and
Benjamin: that the effects of alienation and reification pervade the modern
social 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 with
certain coping mechanisms: it allows us to cushion ourselves better from the
continual ‘shocks’ and traumas of modernity, to ‘roll with the punches’ of
rapid social changes that can be disorienting and anomic in the extreme. But
such adaptations are acquired at tremendous cost: as the fabric of traditional
social relations unravels and nothing is left but the cash-nexus, the collective
rituals and traditions that bound premodern societies together, and that had
transmitted coherent, shared life-narratives from generation to generation,
are effectively lost. These forms of collective solidarity and affirmation are
replaced in the modern world by social atomization, the fragmentation of
experience, and an egotistical, almost solipsistic, individualism. As such, we
are ‘increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around [us] by
way of experience’, concludes Benjamin (1968: 158). Hence, it is not enough
to ‘adapt’ to these forces; in contradistinction to Simmel, they have to be
contested and ultimately transformed.
In many respects, Benjamin’s assessment here is not terribly different from
that of Lukács. But they part company in at least one crucial respect: whereas
Lukács’s romantic anti-capitalism leads him to yearn for a reconstructed
social totality modelled on the supposed Gemeinschaft communities of
premodern times, for Benjamin the task is one of locating in the shards and
fragments of specifically modern everyday life the resources for future social
transformation. Such a project necessarily involves a radical break with past
traditions. In other words, to redeem tradition, especially the suffering of
innumerable past generations, it must be destroyed (Buck-Morss, 1989).
Benjamin does not prompt us to look backwards at a ‘Golden Age’ of
presumptively genuine community, but rather to detect the pulse of utopian
energies in the here and now (and in the most unlikely of places), to tap into
these 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 Benjamin
about such wish-images is that they are anticipations (pace Ernst Bloch) of a

transformed future society, and hence a kind of ‘dreaming forward’, or

‘future nostalgia’. Paradoxically, the actual content of these wish-images of a
future 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 recapitulate
endlessly an idealized past history. ‘In the dream in which every epoch sees
in images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to elements of
Ur-history, that is, of a classless society’, as Benjamin (1973: 159) says.
Such wish-images are best understood as sparks or flashes of insight and
awakening that are spurs to practice, not ‘blueprints’ of some sort of fully
imagined, perfect society of the future. As such, Benjamin’s position here
escapes the charge of ‘social engineering’ that is often levelled at utopianism
(Popper, 1969). Furthermore, these visions can only be realized successfully
if wedded to the immense technological potential of modernity. What
Benjamin called the ‘phantasmagorical’ qualities of the commodity world –
especially the visual consumption of signs and images, ranging from the
physical organization of the 19th-century Parisian arcades to fashion and
advertising – have drained the utopian dream of its creative, anticipatory core
and inculcated a debilitating ‘false consciousness’. The wish-image continues
to channel utopian desire, but in the form of a commodity fetish that can
only be satisfied through a ‘distracted’ and atomized consumption of the
superabundant commodities, mass spectacles and entertainments proffered
by capitalist modernity. The result is that the social world once again became
mythified, congealed into a barren landscape of naturalized, eternal forms.
This is bolstered by the seductive Enlightenment narrative of infinite
progress and endless growth – an ‘empty, homogeneous time’ in which
human agency and collective will are abandoned to an inescapable fate. Indi-
viduals are condemned to engage in the ceaseless, repetitive production and
consumption of ostensibly new goods and services, in a manner akin to
Nietzsche’s doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’, to squander their creative energies
in reified and alienated sociocultural forms. Hence, it is increasingly difficult
to escape the sense that capitalist social relations are part of the inherent order
of 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 of
modern industrial society, to clear away the ‘underbrush of delusion and
myth’ (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-images
and artefacts of the everyday mass culture of the modern city. The task at
hand for him was one of rescuing the ‘truth-content’ of such images from the
phantasmagoria of the commodity and the mythification of the social world.

This involved tearing these profane objects and images out of the monolithic
continuity 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 modern
everyday life in order to glean what is worthwhile out of what has been
discarded or forgotten. In such ‘rescued’ objects and images can be found
multiple temporalities and historical possibilities, which are currently ‘out of
fashion’, coexisting in the same range of material artefacts. In the words of
Highmore, the ragpicker’s task becomes one of ‘cataloguing the broken
promises that have been abandoned in the everyday trash of history’
(Highmore, 2002a: 65). By juxtaposing various descriptions, images and
reportages in montage-like fashion and with a minimum of interpretive
overlay, individuals might be encouraged to forge their own ‘constellations’
of meaning out of these ‘dialectical fairy-tales’. This could lead to a ‘profane
illumination’ of the social world that might unleash the collective energies of
the proletariat and the technological possibilities of modernity in a manner
akin to the ‘splitting of the atom’. Although influenced by the montage tech-
niques pioneered by the Surrealists, Benjamin parted company with their
tendency to wallow in fantasy and chance encounters, arguing that only a
critical, rational knowledge of society and history can break through the
reified and mythified structures of capitalist modernity, draw together the
threads of scattered memories and images into a coherent narrative and
unlock 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 was
intended to facilitate the transmission of a ‘counter-tradition’ of suffering and
revolt, in which the ‘secret agreement’ between the generations of past and
present would be consummated. This helps to explain the urgency of his
injunction that humankind not squander the precious legacy of the ‘weak
messianic power’ with which it has been endowed. And, although Benjamin
drank 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 sought
to reconcile subject and object in a restored organic community, Benjamin
harboured 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 or
suppressed 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-theological
insight into the telos of history to rely on. It was an unequal struggle in which

the enemy had not ‘ceased to be victorious’, a sober assessment that explains
his self-described ‘radical pessimism’. Yet, Benjamin was also acutely aware
that the price to be paid for the failure to redeem the semantic potentials of
the past, and to strive to envisage and build the classless utopia through a
‘definitive interruption’ of the present historical continuum, was a regression
to 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 represent
the terminus of the self-propelled juggernaut of capitalist modernity, or the
inexorable unfolding of some divine plan. Rather, Benjamin understands the
utopian moment as a uniquely human achievement, one that can only be
constructed collectively out of the ‘raw material’ of the modern, urbanized
everyday.
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 the
University of Budapest for her ‘revisionist’ views following the failed
uprising of 1956, she was eventually ‘rehabilitated’ in 1963, whereupon
Heller engaged in historical research on the Renaissance. This kindled a keen
interest in the problems and characteristics of everyday life, which eventu-
ally led to the publication of her eponymous study Everyday Life in the
tumultuous year of 1968. Heller’s preoccupation with the everyday was
always closely intertwined with her political activities; specifically, the dissi-
dent Marxism developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the young firebrands
associated with the so-called ‘Budapest School’ (Gabel, 1975). Heller and her
husband Ferenc Fehér, a frequent intellectual collaborator, emigrated in 1977
to Australia, eventually ending up at the New School for Social Research in
New 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 has
addressed in recent decades such diverse topics as historiography, political
philosophy, 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 Heller
staked 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 of
Marx that focused primarily on the latter’s early texts concerning alienation,
self-realization and ‘species-being’. This was synthesized with the ideas of
certain existentialist (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) and phenomenological

(Kosík, Schütz) thinkers, especially their stress on lived experience within the
life-world, together with Lukács’s theory of social ontology (Wolin, 1987;
Tormey, 2001). Another major influence upon Heller’s approach here is
classical western philosophy, such as Plato’s notion of doxa, or taken-for-
granted opinions, as contrasted with episteme, or scientific truths. Along with
the other thinkers discussed here, Heller believes that everyday life cannot be
considered in isolation, abstracted from wider social relations, institutions
and historical processes. Indeed, the structural differentiation of the everyday
from other social spheres is, in her opinion, a relatively recent historical
development. In premodern societies, daily life was integrated fully into a
broad range of productive, ritualistic and sacred practices, and became
detached from these only in the modern era, when such ‘higher’ pursuits as
science, religion and art become the prerogative of elites and subject to
institutionalization. In an argument that echoes closely one advanced by the
Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) in his Rabelais and His World,
Heller asserts that in the interregnum between the premodern and the
modern – namely, in the Renaissance – there occurred a fruitful interchange
between more specialized scientific and cultural pursuits and the common
people’s everyday lives. By the end of the 17th century, however, this creative
osmosis had ended (Heller, 1978). Rather than growing out of the rhythms
and textures of daily existence, human needs are increasingly subordinated
to the technical requirements of the rapidly expanding apparatus of capital-
ist production and commodity exchange. And, within ‘learned’ discourse, the
everyday ‘came to be thematized from the standpoint of a “truth” which then
defined this life as void of truth’ (Heller, 1985a: 80).
This disparagement of daily life, Heller argues, began to change decisively
in the 20th century, with the emergence of such social theories and philoso-
phies as hermeneutics, phenomenology and Verstehen sociology. She
contends that these developments could only have arisen if the everyday was
recognized as problematic, and hence deserving of study in the first place.
This is largely because modernity represents a distinct threat to the integrity
of the everyday, by subjecting it to an extensive process of bureaucratic
restructuring and rationalization. But although modern social thought has
become aware of the very existence of ‘everyday life’, it has generally viewed
it as ‘inauthentic’ (Heller identifies Heidegger’s Being and Time as especially
symptomatic of this line of thinking), or else treated it in an uncritical and
essentially descriptive fashion, wherein the mundane life-world is construed
as an unchanging and immutable entity (as in the work of Schütz, for
example). Heller strives to avoid the shortcomings of both extremes. She
insists that everyday life has to be analysed on its own terms; yet she also
wants to retain a dialectical and critical focus, by asserting that the everyday
has dynamic but typically suppressed potentialities that need to be brought
to fruition. In taking this position, Heller argues that daily life cannot be

understood as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’, or even an ‘attitude’. Instead, she concep-

tualizes the everyday as an ensemble of historically constituted practices and
forms of subjectivity that are complexly related to and mediated by other
structures, institutions and practices: ‘Everyday life is not “something” but
rather 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 concerns
primarily the social reproduction of the individual and her or his immediate
in-group. As such, it exists in all societies, although of course the actual
content 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 human
reproduction involves first and foremost our capacity for work. Work is a
‘teleological project’ incorporating both physical and mental capacities
through which we externalize ‘species-specific’ powers in the appropriation
and transformation of nature, in a process of ‘objectivation’ that satisfies our
material and social needs. In so doing, we ‘humanize’ nature and ‘naturalize’
humanity, continually remaking ourselves through our usage and mastery of
language, tools and norms as reflexive, purposive and intersubjective crea-
tures. It is in the everyday where human beings acquire certain skills and
competencies to be able to function as acculturated and socialized members
of society. However, this sphere of immediate objectivation is typically taken
for granted by social actors, because it is part of their unquestioned ‘stock
knowledge’ of the world. Indeed, Heller insists that the habitualization of
action 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 if
every act, no matter how trivial or inconsequential, had to be scrutinized and
consciously planned and executed. As such, human behaviour in the context
of daily life is highly particularistic: the everyday is ruled by emotion and
affect; is repetitive and prone to analogical forms of reasoning and over-
generalization; and is based upon immediate perceptions and experiences and
subordinated to the requirements of practical tasks at hand. In Lukácsian
terminology, 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 automatons
or ‘cultural dopes’. As Heller (1987: 305) explains, ‘Norms need to be inter-
preted in ever new contexts, persons need to take initiatives in unforeseeable
situations; they must also cope with the catastrophes of everyday life’.
Furthermore, she insists that the particularistic nature of daily existence is
not eternal or immutable, but linked to historically contingent factors:

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, capitalist
modernity holds out the possibility of a universalization of certain values
regarding human rights, freedoms and possibilities. In other words, Heller
cleaves to the idea that modern society has to be understood dialectically,
because it contains both domineering and emancipatory qualities, albeit in
ways that are not always easy to disentangle. Accordingly, the everyday life-
world is not irredeemably corrupted (as Heidegger or Lukács maintain), or
entirely static and habit-bound (à la Schütz), but a mixture of both routinized
and dynamic elements and open to continual change and transformation.
However degraded and reified it might be under specific sociohistorical
conditions, for Heller the everyday expresses valid forms of knowledge and
suppressed potentialities that need to be identified and encouraged. Although
there are repetitive, habitualized and quasi-instinctive elements within the
everyday that will never disappear (and for good reason),12 Heller argues that
daily life also generates a ‘cognitive’ or ‘cultural surplus’ imbued with myriad
transformative or utopian possibilities. This surplus can be translated into
less fragmented and heterodox and hence more ‘generic’ forms of human
activity that concern the enhancement of species-being, or humanity in
general. Such an enriched experience, whether emotional or intellectual, can
then be re-directed back to daily life in order to change it. But to be able to
reflect 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, to
separate figure from ground. Accordingly, Heller argues that such ‘higher’
objectivations as art and philosophy, but also (less obviously) the fleeting and
spontaneous joys and pleasures of private, intimate life, can play a central
role in this ‘problematization’ of everyday life. These represent ‘utopian’
moments that function to demystify ‘what is from the perspective of what
ought-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 that
is 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 mere
figments 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). Her
position is therefore one that repudiates the ‘strong’ Messianism associated
with 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 utopian
hopes within a largely (but not inevitably) dystopian society that exists in the
present day. This requires a resoluteness of character and a determination to

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 wanted
it, we can still enjoy everything it offers’, says Heller. ‘If “history” plays a
dirty trick on our hopes, we can still do better than despair: even in dark
times, 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 on
the concept of ‘everyday utopianism’ as sketched out in my introduction.
Hopefully without projecting some sort of artificial unity, I have argued that
they share certain overlapping positions, especially their determination not
to regard the everyday as a ‘backdrop’ for ostensibly more important social
institutions or activities. Rather, they see the everyday as an important site
of ideological contestation and the formation of mass consciousness, and
wherein particular human powers and characteristics are formulated and find
expression 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 elements
of daily life, especially in the context of modernity. It can equally be the locus
for the development of non-alienated or emancipatory tendencies that can be
identified and sparked through critical sociocultural analysis, among other
things. This stance is reflected in a constitutive ambivalence all of them have
regarding 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 life
could only be transcended through the Messianic figure of Lenin and the
dynamo of world communism, while Adorno et al. abandoned any belief in
the possibility of social transformation via the agency of the working class
(or any other tangible collective agent, for that matter), and sought out the
dying embers of utopian possibility in the individual contemplation of avant-
garde cultural and intellectual forms. Benjamin, by contrast, follows Simmel
in regarding the objects, images and practices of modern everyday life as satu-
rated with broader significances, and as a crucial repository of the collective
dreams 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, Heller
argues that it is possible to reflect critically upon the static and routinized
qualities of the modern everyday and transform it, especially through various

utopian moments (art, philosophy, love) that can function to ‘defamiliarize’

reified and particularistic social actions and attitudes. Regardless of such
differences and similarities, however, the core idea developed here – that the
everyday is permeated with political and ideological qualities, and constitutes
the crucial terrain for both the exercise of domination and ‘utopic’ resistances
to 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 and
intellectual continuities could not be included here. For example, there are
strictly Freudian approaches (Brown, 1973; Mowitt, 2002), a tradition that is
rooted in Surrealism and French Marxism (ffrench, 2004; Gardiner, 1995), the
Russian approach of Mikhail Bakhtin (Gardiner, 2003; Morson and Emerson,
1990), and so forth. Book-length monographs synthesizing these various critical
approaches can be found in Gardiner (2000) and Highmore (2002a), while a
study that applies some of these theories to more empirical phenomena can be
found 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, one
of the central points of disagreement in the literature is whether the everyday
involves primarily individual acts and particularistic, subjective attitudes, or else
conforms to some sort of overarching structure that is shared by a large group
of 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. For
an excellent study of how modernity affected daily life in the capitalist periphery
during the first few decades of the 20th century, and how local intellectual
traditions dealt with this experience, see Harootunian (2000).
5 Good examples would be the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger
and the aesthetic provocations of the Surrealists. As to the former, in Being and
Time (1962), Heidegger considered the everyday world to be ‘fallen’, because it
was not attuned to the truth of ‘Being’. ‘Authentic’ existence would have to be
located 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 of
everyday life. This prompted Lefebvre to argue that while the Surrealists under-
stood that daily life was routinized and degraded, they failed to realize that this
was 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 perennial
separation between spirit and matter, ideal and reality, utopia and the everyday.

6 Bloch (1986: 146). Moran does, however, discuss the work of Lefebvre in relation
to these events, especially the latter’s theory of the ‘moment’, which, as has been
noted 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 of
relational themes and elements rather than a unified field with respect to the
study of the history of ideas, see Jay (1993).
8 A similar argument can be found in Levitas (1990), although a counter-position
is articulated by Webb (2000).
9 Messianism refers to a belief in ‘end-time’; that is, the culmination, fulfilment or
negation of history in a manner that transforms present-day conditions and ushers
in a radically different form of human existence (see Olson, 1982). However, it is
important 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 capitalist
modernity (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 state
of affairs under postmodernism (see Baudrillard, 1983). I have not addressed here
the usefulness of the concept of ‘alienation’ per se under contemporary social
conditions, which of course many postmodernists have disputed. Suffice to say
that a strong argument can be made for its continuing relevance. Gottdiener
suggests, 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 of

Western Ontario. His books include the edited four-volume collection
Mikhail Bakhtin (Sage, 2003) in the Sage ‘Masters of Modern Social Thought’
series, Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and the
Human 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 of
the Human Sciences, Theory, Culture & Society, Theory and Society, and
Utopian 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: And
Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.
Address: Professor Michael E. Gardiner, Department of Sociology, Social

Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
N6A 5C2. [email: megardin@uwo.ca]

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The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and

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MARXISM, UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY 3

primarily, if not exclusively, outside the formal and repressive structures of

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need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent

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possibilities, and hence constitutes a kind of ‘pre-cognition’, an anticipatory

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MARX: THE ‘RELIGION OF EVERYDAY LIFE’

The fundamental ambivalence regarding everyday life mentioned above can

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toward a realm of spectral abstractions and idealizations (Larrain, 1983). In

Marx roots the concealment [of socio-economic realities] in the inter-

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Marx’s brief remarks contain an implicit psychology: custom sets

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further things to understand about Marx’s treatment of the everyday: first,

SIMMEL: THE ‘TECHNOLOGY OF METROPOLITAN

Georg Simmel was an oddball genius and a prolific, wide-ranging thinker

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everyday utopianism. Although Marx did formulate initially the theories of

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Simmel’s desire to develop a new method and style of sociological writing

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LUKÁCS: ‘RIDDLE OF THE

It is clear from the preceding discussion that Simmel maintained a relatively

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represented a profound challenge to many of the central assumptions of

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communism. Since capitalism could only be understood as a totalizing

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ahistorical in the extreme. In the words of Harootunian, Lukács manifestly

. . . experience of everyday life as a coherently worthy subject of investi-

BENJAMIN: ‘DREAM-HOUSES OF THE

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later the Communist Party) an escape from a routinized and commodified

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MARXISM, UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY 19

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transformed future society, and hence a kind of ‘dreaming forward’, or

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AGNES HELLER: ‘UTOPIAS ARE IN THE PRESENT,

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understood as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’, or even an ‘attitude’. Instead, she concep-

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