'Everyday Life:' a sui generis ontology? Some considerations about Agnes Heller's theory of daily life

Author: Gabriella Paolucci
Year: 2015
Source type: article (essay on Heller's Everyday Life, 1970)
Raw file: raw/articles/paolucci-2015-heller-everyday-life-ontology.md

Summary

Paolucci analyzes Agnes Heller's Everyday Life (1970) as a distinctive ("sui generis") ontological approach that emerged during the end of the crisis of "grand narratives" and the shift from future-oriented politics to "becoming in-the-present." Heller's theory is positioned within the Budapest School tradition (working with Lukács) and distinguishes itself from phenomenological and French sociological ontologies of everyday life. Paolucci traces Heller's four theoretical moves: (1) establishing reproduction as the fundamental concept; (2) distinguishing everyday life as analytical category vs. historically determined reality; (3) using alienation to critique capitalist everyday life; (4) developing a dialectic between everyday and non-everyday (the least successful move). The article emphasizes Heller's Marxist grounding of everyday life as self-reproduction that makes social reproduction possible.

Key Claims

• Historical context: Everyday Life was published when "the interest shown by the social sciences in the everyday dimension of life was rapidly increasing" — historiography, philosophy, psychology, sociology all embraced everyday life as a new area. This coincided with "the end of the crisis of the 'grand narratives' and of the eschatological vision of historical becoming."

• Shift from future to present: The period was "characterised by the criticism of a linear and progressive vision of history" and "the loss in legitimisation to which the philosophy of progress and its effects were subjected led unavoidably to a revision of the underpinnings of the modern political project." The collective movements of the 1960s-70s "reintroduced the idea of 'becoming in-the-present'" as a political project not dependent on future realizations.

• Heller's quote: "If there is no 'tomorrow' that is already today, there is no tomorrow at all" (Heller, 1980, A Theory of History). This reorientation "shifted the attention of History onto everyday life, from macro social changes to the individual, private and subjective dimension of change."

• Heller's theoretical project vs. alternative ontologies: Heller's system aims at "detracting the legitimacy of other alternative visions that hypostatised everyday life, rejecting their construction of a negative ontology of everyday life and their exalting of everyday life independently of its socio-historical definitions."

• Four theoretical moves:

  1. Reproduction as fundamental concept: Establishes category of 'reproduction' based on both objective criteria (observable activities for self-reproduction) and subjective criteria (symbolic construction processes attributing meaning). This differs from phenomenology which mainly used symbolic criteria.

  2. Analytical vs. historical distinction: Distinguishes 'everyday life' as analytical category from 'everyday life' as historically determined — "fundamental to work by Heller as well as other Marxist authors, such as Lefebvre." This is "clearly anti-ontological" and overcomes "the flattening of the concept of everyday life onto the idea of everyday life as concretely determined" (as in Heidegger's Being and Time).

  3. Alienation as critique: Uses notion of 'alienation' to develop "a critique of everyday life as this was conceived in capitalist society; towards, that is, the contemporary conditions, historically determined, of the self-reproduction of individuals."

  4. Dialectic of everyday/non-everyday: Using Lukács' The Specificity of the Aesthetic, develops theory of dialectics between everyday and non-everyday. This was "the least successful, but... also the most difficult" move. Heller's "lack of success in constructing a solid theoretical relationship between the everyday and the non-everyday led her approach to be ranked with the other ontological approaches, even if it was sui generis."

• Everyday life as self-reproduction: "If individuals are to reproduce society, they must reproduce themselves as individuals. We may define 'everyday life' as the aggregate of those individual reproduction factors which, pari passu, make social reproduction possible."

• Marxist grounding: Heller's use of reproduction "links the Hellerian proposal to that of other Marxist scholars like Henry Lefebvre" and anchors analysis "to the possibility of living, to its reality," creating "a basis for a criticism of those theories that hypostatise everyday life as banality."

• Self-reproduction as impetus: "Persons can reproduce society only by reproducing themselves as persons. But reproduction of society does not follow automatically from the self-reproduction of persons, in the same way as a breed of cattle is spontaneously reproduced by reproduction of its individual members. Man can reproduce himself only by discharging his social functions, and self-reproduction becomes the impetus to social reproduction."

• Objectification in immediate environment: "When we say that in everyday life the 'person' directly reproduces himself and his world (his local world) and, indirectly, the social aggregate, the 'wide world', we are using concepts in a very loose and figurative system." The individual must "take possession of the world in which he lives" and "understand the system of habits" and acquire capacities asked of him. "All the objectifications of everyday life therefore concern only the immediate environment and the single individual, otherwise they transcend the everyday."

• Transcendence through everyday skills: "All the abilities and 'affections' by which the individual transcends his immediate environment through their reference to the world in its totality, are acquired during the course of each day, on the terrane of everyday life." Skills appropriated in everyday life (courage, self-control, coping with problems, feeling pleasure in success, loyalty, gratitude) enable objectization in "higher forms."

• Critique of Heidegger: Heller is "constantly polemical with Heidegger's existentialist philosophy" and widens Lukács's critique. Lukács criticized Heidegger for impoverishing and deforming "the structure and the essence of everyday life," concentrating "on the relation between everyday life and knowledge. If everyday life loses its dynamic connection with knowledge and with science... it loses with that its most genuine character."

Connections

Concepts: everyday-life
Related source notes: lefebvre-1991-critique-of-everyday-life, thompson-2013-what-is-everyday-life

Direct Quotes

"If there is no 'tomorrow' that is already today, there is no tomorrow at all." — Heller

"If individuals are to reproduce society, they must reproduce themselves as individuals. We may define 'everyday life' as the aggregate of those individual reproduction factors which, pari passu, make social reproduction possible."

"Man can reproduce himself only by discharging his social functions, and self-reproduction becomes the impetus to social reproduction."

"All the abilities and 'affections' by which the individual transcends his immediate environment through their reference to the world in its totality, are acquired during the course of each day, on the terrane of everyday life."

Open Questions

• How does Heller's "sui generis ontology" relate to the wiki's existing synthesis on "The Everyday and the Phenomenology of Place"? Is Heller's reproduction-based approach compatible with the phenomenological dwelling tradition?
• What is the relationship between Heller's "alienation" critique and Marx's original concept? Does her Budapest School reading inflect it differently?
• How does the dialectic of everyday/non-everyday connect to Lefebvre's moments vs. everyday life distinction?
• Does Heller's approach provide a bridge between the Marxist critique tradition and the phenomenological tradition in the wiki?