RELATED TERMS: The Everyday and Design; Alienation
Alltäglichkeit – Lefebvre, Lukács, Heidegger
Alltäglichkeit is a German word meaning everydayness. Michel Trebitsch (2014: 13) highlights a curious affinity between Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, by way of Heidegger, concerning the use of that term. The issue for design practices, from the perspective of Incomplete …, concerns a questioning of the lowly status assigned to everydayness, whether as inauthenticity, alienation or simply triviality. The everyday, it is held here, is the site wherein those practices that generate such distinctions as the ontological difference are enacted, questioned, un-done and re-done through their reflexive ‘transcendental empiricism’, to use a paradoxical phrase coined by Deleuze [1].
The young Lukács, in his pre-Marxist period, formulated the concept of Alltäglichkeit in 1911 in a passage of Metaphysik der Tragödie. For Lukacs, Alltäglichkeit designated the ‘trivial’, inauthentic life of the human being, the dreary, mechanical and repetitive unfolding of the everyday (Trebitsch, 2014: 13). Lukács contrasts this mode of living with an ‘authentic’ life in which the human being accedes to themselves through the work of art or, even better, turns themselves into a work of art.
However, in 1923, in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács made a radical break with this ontology of consciousness. He relocated consciousness in historicity, on the basis of the Marxist theory of alienation. In doing so, Lukács shifted the antagonism between authentic and inauthentic life to the history of class society. Alienation, however, is not simply inauthentic life. Rather, alienation is that ‘reification of consciousness’ produced by the fetishism of commodities. Only proletarian class consciousness will be able to overcome this condition, according to the now-Marxist Lukács.
While similarly drawing on a Marxist theory of consciousness and employing the theory of alienation, nevertheless the concept of the reification of consciousness, which is central to Lukács, is missing in Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, all consciousness is mystified, even proletarian class consciousness. In this way, Lefebvre is closer to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics which builds its critical theory on the way the negative is at work in social reality, a negativity which permits a difference that permits a standing back from the ‘immediacy’ of the already-there.
Although not being directly aware of Lukacs’ text at the time of writing La Conscience mystifiée, when returning to these similarities in volume three of Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre acknowledges a debt to Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger employs the concept of Alltäglichkeit to characterise the mode of existence in which human being, as Dasein, primarily and usually shows itself (Kaufer, 2021). Such everydayness, for Heidegger, reveals essential characteristics of existence which he nevertheless defines as inauthentic existence. In so far as Dasein is Being-with-one-another, that is, Mitsein, it stops being itself and the ascendancy of others rids it of its Being. This is all the more so because, for Heidegger, the other is the They, the indeterminate, neuter ‘Man’.
Thus, for Heidegger, Alltäglichkeit opens the way to a loss of direction, to dereliction and disquiet. Trebitsch proposes that it may have been on the basis of his acquaintanceship with Heidegger, who knew Lukács’s early writings, and whose Being and Time owes so much to History and Class Consciousness and the concept of reification, that Lefebvre developed a problematic of the concept of everyday life that was unwittingly every close to that of Lukács.
Notes
[1] For a detailed discussion of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, see chapter 8 of Barry Allen’s (2021) Empiricisms: experience and experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene.
Reference
Allen, B. (2021) Empiricisms: experience and experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Trebitsch, M. (2014) Preface [to Volume 1], in Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life, the one volume edition. London, UK: Verso, pp. 3–24.
Kaufer, S. (2021) Everydayness (Alltaglichkeit), in Wrathall, M. A. (ed.) The Cambridge Heidegger lexicon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–296.
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