Michael E. Gardiner

Everyday utopianism: Lefebvre and his critics

The strategy of sociocultural critique through the ‘problematization’ or ‘defamiliarization’ of the habitualized character of everyday life is one that is well-established in the literature, especially for adherents of various neo-Marxisms. However, in recent years, several prominent critics have taken issue with the concept of defamiliarization, arguing that the habit-bound, ‘distracted’ and routinized character of the everyday cannot be easily contrasted with, or superceded by, the exceptional or the extraordinary. Such a position, it is suggested, both denigrates the integrity of daily life and promotes a kind of incipient transcendentalism. The work of Henri Lefebvre is often taken to be representative in this regard, and various phenomenologies or pragmatisms are promoted in his stead. In this article, I take issue with such critics, by analyzing Lefebvre’s writings on such key points as his treatment of routine in everyday life, as well as his concepts of totality, dialectics and critique. I end up asserting that, contrary to what is often said, Lefebvre does not promote a dualistic transcendentalism in which daily life is denigrated, but rather an ‘everyday utopianism’ in which routine and creativity, the trivial and the extraordinary, are viewed as productively intertwined rather than opposed. As such, I seek to defend the notion of ‘critique’ vis-à-vis the everyday, and to demonstrate the on-going relevance of Lefebvre’s work, as well as that of the ‘counter-tradition’ that is loosely associated with his name.

Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out

The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of moments and his conceptions of ‘the everyday’ draw upon often overlooked (and controversial) elements from Leibniz’s monadology and other later writings. This essay concludes by considering how substituting ‘everyday life’ for the ‘culture’ of cultural studies requires, among other things, a closer consideration of the immanently biopolitical implications that Lefebvre teased out of Leibniz. As the introductory essay for this special issue of Cultural Studies, we also set up, in the final section here, an overview of our contributors’ own unique angles of approach to the study of everyday life at the dawn of the 21st century.

Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Sociology of Boredom’

The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’ in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvre’s writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.

Marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everyday

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.

Post-Romantic irony in Bakhtin and Lefebvre

Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective assessments of irony (including Romantic irony), and, more specifically, of the ironic register as a potential vehicle for socio-cultural criticism. Although the positions Bakhtin and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – such as extensive use of Socrates in the writings of each – there are also significant differences, not least because Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is more fully developed than Bakhtin’s. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism, together with his scattered and often contradictory remarks on irony, can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment by reference to Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts, especially the latter’s notions of ‘Revolutionary romanticism’ and ‘Marxist irony’.

Bakhtin in the fullness of time: Bakhtinian theory and the process of social education

This special issue takes the works of Mikhail Bakhtin as its inspiration in the contemplation of the potential of dialogic scholarship for philosophy of education. Although a handful of recent EPAT articles have already begun to explore such potential in education concerning learning dialogues over the past 5 years (see for instance: Chen Johnsson, 2013; Rule, 2011; White, 2014a) and the learning potential of humour specifically (see for instance: Vlieghe, 2014; White, 2014b), this issue takes Bakhtin’s work to central stage in a targetted and critical manner by exploring central philosophical ideas in contemplation of their potential for education today. The sources for such endeavours are complex and draw from a much wider philosophical and disciplinary base than Bakhtin alone. This is necessary for at least two key reasons: Firstly, because Bakhtin was influenced by a range of philosophical sources throughout his long life of writing and his works are sourced from fragments over time. Secondly, it is important to recognise that Bakhtin was not known first and foremost as an educationalist in a contemporary sense, and his work does not seek to specifically impose pedagogical instruction or commentary. Nonetheless, as the articles in this issue attest, dialogic philosophy has much to offer in the consideration of learning, relationships and what these aspects mean for contemporary society. While Bakhtin’s work has been widely received in educational studies in recent years, there is only one existing article on classroom practice that seems to have survived, and this does not really convey the sophistication of his cultural-historical works. This is probably because Bakhtin was steeped not in institutionally positioned pedagogical practice (though he taught in a pedagogical institute in the post-war period), but in a more general philosophy of culture in which the educational process was embedded. Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective was fundamentally shaped by postHegelian German philosophy, especially as developed by the Marburg school of neoKantianism, and by the Humboldtian trend in German philology and pedagogy. Education was one of the fundamental dimensions of the process of becoming in Hegelian philosophy, generally known as Bildung (education or formation). This remained embedded in post-Hegelian idealist philosophy, and indeed in Marxism. In the former, however, philosophy, pedagogy and philology were combined into a general philosophy of the Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences, with their own distinct methodology, while the latter rejected the compartmentalisation of science. Bakhtin inherits the aims of post-Hegelian idealism and indeed seeks to develop a distinctive

Critique of Accelerationism

The global financial crisis beginning in 2008 has encouraged the revitalization of a wide spectrum of leftist theorizing, but arguably the most audacious is that of ‘accelerationism’. Left-accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist society as a way to escape its gravitational orbit and ‘repurpose’ the very material infrastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends. The central task here is to engage accelerationism with a thinker of the post-Autonomist tradition, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Contrary to Williams and Srnicek, co-authors of the #Accelerate manifesto, Bifo asserts that acceleration per se only augments the power and dynamism of capital, and posits instead a ‘post-politics’ of ironic detachment, aesthetic cultivation, and ‘therapy’. Contrasting Bifo and accelerationism clarifies each of their assumptions and core arguments, and points the way to a more nuanced perspective on these issues, in a contemporaneous moment marked in equal measure by inestimable threat and liberatory promise.

Bakhtin, Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

Abstract This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.

Bakhtin and the ‘general intellect’

Abstract One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective workers affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control, because it raises the possibility that the mass ‘cognitive worker’, and the inherently co-operative principles it embodies, can detach itself from neoliberal mechanisms of subsumption and valorisation and lay the foundation for a new communalistic ethos. What is intriguing is that several autonomists evoke the work of Mikhail Bakhtin vis-à-vis the ‘general intellect’. Bakhtin did maintain that dialogism is an irreducibly collective phenomenon, and that we all contribute to the continuous making and remaking of language. We do not ‘own’ the words we use; as such, meaning is necessarily plural and heterogeneous, the product of the interaction of many texts and voices that can only be pragmatically and contingently unified. The present article seeks to explore the connection between Bakhtin and autonomism, focusing on the insight that communication is always ‘more than myself’, and hence integral to the ‘social brain’ that is a shared legacy, our ‘commonwealth’. It also raises the possibility of a more ‘troublesome’ Bakhtin than is generally countenanced by the liberal academy, and a concomitantly ‘dangerous’ dialogism that haunts a digitalised and networked world marked in equal measure by tremendous emancipatory promise and catastrophic threat.

Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (review)

In a career spanning nearly a half-century, the U.S. writer and activist Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) fashioned a distinctive and highly ambitious social theory. Dubbing it “social ecology” (not to be confused with the “social ecology” pioneered by the Chicago school of urban sociology in the 1920s and 1930s), Bookchin aimed to synthesize elements of classical philosophy (especially Aristotle), humanistic Marxism, anarchism, natural science, and radical ecology. His goal was a holistic theory that would allow for a systematic analysis of our deeply problematic relationship with the nonhuman world and provide the necessary political and ethical guidelines so as to reconcile humanity and nature in the context of an imagined “good society.” But there can be no such reconciliation until humanity itself is liberated in the form of free, self-governing, and cooperative communities, because, in Bookchin’s reasoning, the domination of humankind through coercive and hierarchically structured societies both precedes historically and functions to legitimate the domination of nature. Th e roots of the contemporary environmental crisis can therefore be traced to what Bookchin calls an “underlying mentality of domination,” one that projects the natural world as an unyielding and vindictive “realm of necessity,” which must be conquered by a combination of brute force and ceaseless technological innovation. In this cosmic drama, humanity pulls itself out of the primordial slime by its own bootstraps so that it can enter the promised land of material abundance and “civilized” values, but at the supposedly unavoidable cost of social repression and ideologies of command and control. Such master narratives have encouraged our profound alienation from, and fear of, the natural world. But while it is imperative to overcome this alienation, the goal should not be to “dissolve” humanity into an abstract, monistic Nature, as “deep” or