Catching up on my reading of Verso books has resulted in the conundrum in my mind again about the inter-connection between the two. My approach here is to revisit those issues, but in a rambling manner, and not to attain any conclusions, because I have none. Of course, not too long ago the issue was discussed in the journal Cultural and Social History. One of the discussants at that time, Geoff Eley, has recently published a compendium of his essays in which he approaches the matter again, with the intention of reconciling the two strands, including a detailed analysis of Alltagsgeschichte (History Made Conscious: Politics of Knowledge, Politics of the Past (London, 2023)). In The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (London, 2023), Kristin Ross, whom I greatly admire, cautions about ‘everyday life’ that it can tend towards conservatism or traditionalism in that it is unnecessarily synchronic and has no account for change and transformation. That same tendency, she implies, might apply to spatial history (a corruption of Lefebvre’s notion of the everyday) and cultural history. (She has, interestingly, much comment on Rancière on impetus for abrupt change (‘Historicizing untimeliness’). Incidentally, some unregenerate Marxists have recently in the same vein heavily criticized the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno on similar grounds, for theorizing culture as an independent variable (not least Perry Anderson) (For the Frankfurt School, Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London, 2016); the Frankfurt School was pessimistic about the trend of consumerism, of course).
Ross has misgivings that cultural history and the history of ‘everyday life’ will become like structuralism and the Annales School, ignoring the ‘mutable’ (pp. 101-11). In this context, it would seem, however, that cultural change can and has caused ruptures, if ‘consumer revolutions’ and ‘consumption’ are apparently always in progress. She illustrates this consequence in ‘Shopping: an introduction to Emile Zola’s The Ladies Paradise’ (Au Bonheur des Dames – now available as a DVD). In acknowledging Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’, she illustrates how the cultural can be transformative: consolidating bourgeois hegemony (pp. 135-6). I wonder, however, whether, in her search for the disruptive, like her research into the Commune, she is not repositioning the conjuncture.
Geoff Eley is more transparent, perhaps:
By exploring social history in these experiential or subjective dimensions, conventional distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ might be transcended, and the elusive connection between ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ finally discovered. That, he suggests, was the original purpose of Alltagsgeschichte (pp. 139-40). Has the history of ‘everyday life’ retained or lost that intention? There is an affective sense for discovering ‘the everyday’, but does it contribute to the understanding of change and transformation?
The priority [of Alltagsgeschichte]was a social history of subjective meanings drawn from highly concrete microhistorical settings – not to supplant, but to specify and enrich understanding of structural processes of social change (p. 142).I admit that I’m still in a dichotomy. When I read each, I nod my head. As I said, it’s an open blog.