In this short but scholarly written book, John (the author) makes a brilliant effort to revive the philosophical significance of the everyday by looking into the history of this concept's use in the primary texts on the philosophy of revolutionary praxis and everyday life from 1917 to 1975.

This book's broad thesis is that the concept of everyday has a deep philosophical and ideological significance. The specific thesis is that an adequate understanding of revolutionary praxis guarantees the philosophical and ideological significance of the everyday and, at the same time, questions the cultural theories that misidentify the everyday with the 'ordinariness' which is empty of that significance.

In the Prologue (pp. 1-15), John outlines the nature and objective of this book, besides underlining what Lefebvre calls the dangerous memories of Marx's revolutionary program. John's emphasis on the dangerous memories works as an initial persuasion for the subscription of a particular understanding of Marxism, namely, that Marxism is never to be meant as being 'without the collective aesthetic and sensuous reappropriation of everyday experience' (p. 13).  Marx never told us that consumption of material goods is everything in life. Nor, of course, that each of us can be a poet or painter. But his revolutionary praxis aims at he the rediscovery of our creativity and natural spontaneity in the sense that each of us can ultimately 'perceive the world through the eyes of a painter, the ears of a musician and the language of a poet' (p.13). This understanding of Marxism facilitates the idea that Marxism advances the concept of everyday as a cultural category rather than an empirical category.

The first chapter, "The Everyday and the Philosophy of Praxis" (pp. 16-58), contains a praiseworthy illustration of the fact that different thinkers have advanced the philosophy of praxis in different ways and, accordingly, there are different understandings of the everyday, even if each understanding of the everyday springs from its corresponding philosophy of praxis.

John's account of Lukacs' philosophy of praxis highlights on the post-revolutionary secularization of the everyday. His exposition of Trotsky's critique of mechanical materialism is an attempt to show how the everyday is transformed from a political category to a cultural category. The discussion on Karl Korsch's attack on pseudo-scientism points out a denaturalization of the everyday by means of coinciding consciousness with reality or theory with practice. John's account of Gramsci's theory of hegemony illustrates the everyday as a cultural category but the culture is 'from below' (the theory of cultural resistance 'from below'). In his exposition of Benjamin's Productivism, John focuses on the everyday as a cultural category when mechanical reproduction is valued very high in the culture; technological revolution does not prevent the everyday from becoming cultural, nor does it essentially turns the everyday a Heideggerian inauthentic everydayness. Finally, towards the end of the chapter, John distinguishes Arvatov's Productivism from Benjamin's Productivism in order to explain the dissolution of the everyday, to underline that the everyday can even be understood as being replaceable 'by continually evolving forms of social being' (p.52).

Of course, this chapter also includes the idea of Freudian denaturalization of the everyday, the idea of gendering or feminizing the everyday (as it follows from Kollantai (Red Love) and Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex); stressing on Kollantai idea that 'the liberation of the women' is the central task of transforming the everyday life), and the idea of Americanization or Taylorization of the everyday. However discussions on these ideas are very short since they are meant to clarify some other main points.

What Hegel's dialectics is to the theories John discussed in the 1^st chapter, Freudian Psychoanalysis is to those in the 2^nd chapter, "Everyday as Trace and Remainder". This chapter includes theories of everyday advocated by Benjamin, Lefebvre, Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Vaneigem and De Certeau. Benjamin is credited of being 'the first theorist of everyday to incorporate the hermeneutic possibilities of Freud's psychoanalysis into a 'microscopic' hermeneutics of culture' (p.60).  Culture, like a psychic life, has the everyday appearances as its interpretable content so that the wellbeing of a culture can be brought about through a reification of the concealed dissatisfaction and loss associated with everyday life. The important aspect of Benjamin's adaptation of Freudian hermeneutics is that it 'disengages the everyday as cultural category from questions of systematic political strategy and class agency' (p62); and paves the way for the aesthetic transformation of the everyday.

Whereas everyday's aesthetic transformation through Freudian psychoanalysis is a major contribution by Benjamin to the philosophy of everyday, everyday's social transformation through Husserlian phenomenology is a significant move by Lefebvre. The former account draws a distinction between the (the aesthetic and non-trivial) 'repetition' and the (trivial) 'repetitiveness' of the everyday experiences to distinguish the everyday from 'everydayness'. The latter account does accept that distinction at a conceptual level but, at a phenomenological level, gets them 'co-present' so that the everyday can be conceived of being an elevated live experience of the dialectic becoming of the common culture. The everyday represents the 'daily forms of resistance and common culture which consciously and unconsciously generate the wider horizons of class consciousness' (p.67).

John has a short discussion on Maurice Blanchot's 'minimalist theory of the subject' and Vanigem's 'radical subjectivity' or the 'maximalist subject' in order to highlight on the significant relationship between the everyday life and the authentic self-realization. Then, he moves to De Certeus' critique of the 'passive consumer of culture' that indicates an expansion of the self-positing creativity. The critique is worked out in a framework of 'reader-response' theory and, in accordance to the critique, the creative element in 'story-telling' is viewed as 'a kind of semiotic transformation of, and symbolic emancipation from, the brute everyday' (p.92). De Certeau upholds a model of knowledge that defies authority and entertains both the master and the pupil as contributors; and the model gives no privilege of the scriptural over the oral and spontaneous.

Chapter 3, "Lefebvre's Dialectiacal Irony: Marx and the Everyday", is on Lefebvre's development of ironized Marxism where irony is understood as 'a search for truth in protest against truth' (p. 104); and this sense of irony presupposes maieutics. Lefebvre's use of 'ironization' is meant to reformulate the 'irreducible remainder' in the critiques of the everyday. The remainder does not free the desire from reason rather it brings about 'adaptive desire' and opens up reason to its current historical limits. 'If there is irony in the history, it is because there is such a thing as history, real history with unforeseen tragedy and comedy. Conversely, because there really is history and the aleatory, there is such a thing as irony' (p. 106). Lefebvre is in favor of a Marxian total revolutionary praxis which advocates for a self-conscious activity, self-creativity and self-administration. He relies on the idea of a self-irony through which the actualization of these aspects of total revolutionary praxis is possible.

The Epilogue (pp. 120-123) suggests the possibility of 'a fundamental transformation of the democratic content of the concept of the everyday in the twentieth century' (p. 120); similar to the revolutionary contents' various transformations outlined in the book.

This book is an original contribution to Marxism and Culture and, more importantly, to the field of philosophical anthropology. It advocates for a humanistic and aesthetic interpretation of Marx, challenges the cultural studies that take the world of everyday life for granted, as if it is empty of philosophical and ideological bearing, and, thereby, human beings are mistaken for leading an everyday life alienated from philosophy and ideology. In short, for John, no life of a human subject is devoid of its philosophy and ideology born out in the space of the everyday meant to breathe in and breathe out. I think, even the Wittgensteinian scholars and philosophers of ordinary language may take this book seriously in so far as they use the analysis of everyday language as an instrument to solve some philosophical problems. For the every day language might not be without an ideological and philosophical bearing as much as the everyday itself is not.

Although this book is mainly for the Marxian scholars and scholars of Cultural studies, Philosophical Anthropology, I believe that a short introduction to Marxism (as a replacement to the Prologue) and a brief account of Hegel's dialectics (as a section in the first chapter) can make the book more accessible and interesting for a general reader.

© 2007 Laxminarayan Lenka

 Dr. Laxminarayan Lenka, Department of Philosophy, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India.

Categories: Philosophical