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Thesis Eleven

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 DOI: 10.1177/0725513603751008

2003 75: 108Thesis ElevenPeter Beilharz

Budapest Central: Agnes Heller'S Theory of Modernity  

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NOTES AND DISCUSSION

BUDAPEST CENTRAL: AGNESHELLER’S THEORY OFMODERNITY

Peter Beilharz

Agnes Heller’s work has long been caught up with the idea of Historyand history, histories, the big world pictures and also the small personalstories which run alongside and under their hypostatized versions in thepolitics of state or in popular culture and its mythologies. Modernity, or themodern, is the other big theme in Heller’s work, this again with the matchingemphasis on the experience of modernity and its core value of contingency.Together with this enthusiasm for the value of contingency, Heller insists onthe necessity of pluralism. Having learned her Marxism from Lukács, asWeberian-Marxism, Heller’s theory has always had Marx as its guide, even asher personal project becomes detached from Marx after The Theory of Needin Marx (1976). The angel of history who persistently shadows her work intothe more recent period, however, is that of Weber. Weber’s spirit is closer tothat of our own times, and his perspectivism and methodological pluralismbetter reflect postmodern sensibilities, a life after high modernism, afterFordism, after the big dreams and nightmares of totalitarianism.

The best statement of this methodological pluralism in Heller’s work inits sociological form came in 1983, with the publication of the programmaticFehér-Heller statement ‘Class, Democracy, Modernity’, in Eastern Left,Western Left. Marx’s temptation is to reduce modernity to capitalism, to side-step civil society and to leave the state in the background, as epiphenom-ena. Fehér and Heller, in the 1983 text, begin rather with theWeberian-Marxism ambit, that modernity is the period and the region in

Thesis Eleven, Number 75, November 2003: 108–113SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd[0725-5136(200311)75;108–113;037129]

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which capitalism, industrialization and democracy appear simultaneously,reacting to, reinforcing, complementing and checking each other (Fehér andHeller, 1987: 201). This formulation was a theoretical anticipation of theprojects now collectively assembled, twenty years later, under the categorieswhich refer to alternative or multiple modernities. America is not the onlymodernity (or capitalism, or empire) on this thinking. The very same year(1983) Fehér and Heller together with György Markus published their remark-able analysis of Soviet-type modernity in Dictatorship Over Needs. Over thefollowing years, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) published Modernity and the Holo-caust and Jeffrey Herf (1984) published Reactionary Modernism, and thespecies of German totalitarian modernity were on the map alongside theSoviet experience. In this period of their Australian sojourn, the Hungariansalso came to know something of this, lazy or accidental modernity. Havingbegun in a small country, in Hungary, and travelled via another, in theantipodes, Fehér and Heller’s next step was to America, to New York, to thecentre of the web, to the aura left by Hannah Arendt at the New School. Thebooks continued, personal instalments in a personal theory. Their receptionwas never spectacular; there was no choreographed spectacle, no A-list booklaunches of glitterati; there was always more work to do, commuting betweenNew York and Budapest.

A Theory of Modernity came in under the radar (Heller, 1999). Heller’sreception in the centres has always been marginal. Fifteen years spentteaching in Manhattan has not shifted this – perhaps because she changesher mind? Or perhaps because she happily goes her own way. She does notseek a school, or to establish a constituency. As Heller puts it in opening ATheory of Modernity, it is entirely possible that the self-same author willdevise more than one theory of modernity in a lifetime. The pretexts exist,as in the 1983 essay ‘Class, Modernity, Democracy’, as do the post-texts, likeThe Three Logics of Modernity (Heller, 2001). As Heller observes, A Theory ofModernity can also be read as the closing frame of a trilogy, which beganwith A Theory of History (1982) and had A Philosophy of History in Fragments(1993) as its interval. The formal difference between the first two volumes isstriking, not least in voice. A Theory of History, ironically, is closer to tra-ditional philosophy of history, while the Fragments book shifts away fromthe more authoritative tone of historiography towards the fictive which endsin An Ethics of Personality with imaginary letters between imaginary relatives(Heller, 1996). At a different level, the two earlier books could be incorpor-ated conceptually, as universal and particular, the fragment.

One point of consistency across Heller’s theory, however, lies in itsattention to the everyday. Heller’s is not merely a sociology of modernity,or, if it is, it includes a sociology of modernity as everyday life. Modernityhas its dynamics, at higher levels of abstraction, from rationalization tocommodification and differentiation, but it is mediated by the level of experi-ence. Heller’s own encounter with modernity, or modernities has been

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extraordinary, and yet common – from Budapest to Auschwitz, to the Hun-garian version of communism, through to exile in Australia, hope in America,and the entirely unexpected return to Budapest after the fall of Communism.Through all this, the quality of insight in Heller’s work depends on intuition,and experience counts as much as insight or intellect. Agnes Heller thereforesets out, not to survey other peoples’ theories of modernity, but to generatea personal theory that will nevertheless have some universalistic claims. Eventhe biggest theoretical claims, here, are personal, for the presence of Marxpersists, as does the ghost of Weber via Lukács, where it all began, inBudapest all those years ago. Marx recedes; Weber persists because of thebreadth of his frame of reference, and because attitudinally he was the firstswallow of the postmodern, identified more conventionally into the 80s withthe figure of Nietzsche, even more fashionably with Heidegger.

In my recollection of the time we spent together in Melbourne over theyears from 1978–1986, it was Ferenc Fehér who prompted the heightenedsense of being-after. Here the postmodern was not a project, but a condition,or a sensibility. Or to use the language Heller uses in A Theory of Modernity,it is a matter of perspective. Heller presents this book as a theory of mod-ernity from a postmodern perspective. Much of what passes for postmodern,in comparison, is actually closer to the perspective we call modernist, as inthe mantra ‘all that is solid’. Postmodernity is not the stage that comes aftermodernity. It is modern. Modernism is also part of the postmodern, eventhough modernist modernity cannot regain its absolute self-confidence.Modernist modernity was locomotive; its image of transience, such as it was,was the railway station. The residual traditionalism of this earlier modernismlay in its hesitance to embrace motion fully, and in its use of the future as ahorizon or destination beyond rather than a present of Jetztzeit. Some of thesefuture horizons were awful. The locomotive breath pushed its victims toAuschwitz and to the Gulag. Our postmoderns, in comparison, accept life onthe railway station, this perhaps especially in Europe; in America, in com-parison, the poor stick with Greyhound, the tourists in the airport terminals.Whatever the form of propulsion, today, the future is closer, ever unknownwith Heller. We now live on Budapest Central. Yet the moral implication ofliving in this transience is not bad; it implies responsibility for the present,rather than the abstract, and always potentially dangerous commitment to thedistant future of utopia or dystopia. This is an ethics of responsibility, or care,rather than of ultimate ends.

Marx was the locomotive of classical theory, Trotsky his great historicinheritor. Weber was too melancholic for this, seeking respite rather inAscona, while Hegel stays settled in the old Weimar. Marx lived up to hisown expectations in at least one sense – he was the most revolutionary oftheorists, ultimately the advocate of both technology and redemption. Mod-ernity, here defined as capitalism, is dynamic and future oriented. Marxcannot finally disentangle the goal of human autonomy from the drive to

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rational mastery. If Romanticism and Enlightenment are the two faces ofmodernity, then it is Marx who manages most powerfully to wear both ofthese masks. This is why Marx is so central for us, as Castoriadis showed,and why he remains so inseparably bound to the Promethean spirit, too closeto the gods for us as mere mortals.

Now we are a world after Marx. Modernity is autopoetic, and functional– this much of Luhmann is retained by Heller. We move, we choose or areforced to move, to fulfil or to fail in our destinies, not to follow the pre-scriptions of our birth. We retain this sense of romantic action even as wesuffer under the weight of the forces we call structures. This is precisely whatwe call contingency, and it is central to Heller’s thinking, which is at least asmuch a philosophy of experience as it is a sociology of action. We make our-selves; in this sense we choose ourselves, however successfully. The worldmoves, and we also move it.

Yet this theory of action occurs within the theory of modernity and itslogics or dynamics. Heller’s is not a naïve argument; but it refuses that kindof victim thinking which runs through from Rousseau, where we can onlyever be creatures of our circumstances. Heller now suggests that there arethree logics of modernity: the logic of technology, the logic of the functionalallocation of social positions, and the logic of political power. Modernity isbest seen not as a homogenized or totalized whole, but as a fragmentedworld of some open, but not unlimited, possibilities. These logics are plural,and pluralizing. Ours is neither the world of the iron cage, nor of hopelessglobalization. These three logics of modernity can work together, or intension; they need carriers, or agents.

It is not technology, but mentality or imagination that enframes. Yet ifthe first logic of modernity is typically indicated by the word technology, thesecond logic refers to markets, labour markets, and money, all the ingredi-ents of Gesellschaft. This is the point at which romantics come out in a rash,for they compare not the old world and the new, but the new and an (old)ideal, that of Gemeinschaft. Merit and meritocracy may not work, but it is abetter (more modern) guide than the value of mindless tradition here.Monetization frees people from personal dependency. Monetization may notbe very dignified, but it does expand the realm of freedom. Heller’s shadowthinker as sociologist here, then, is neither Marx nor Tönnies, but Simmel.Her philosophical doppelganger is Kierkegaard. Nor does this sensibility thenmean that societies like ours can be equal, or satisfied, or dispense with alien-ation, neither the reality nor the concept. The rich do not sleep on BudapestCentral. But we still have to hold modernity to its promise, of democracy andfreedom. For, to repeat Heller’s is not a naïve sociology, even if its concernis to identify room to manoeuvre. Nor is it a sociology of action, waiting forthe next social movement. Its optimism is more immediate and anthropo-logical. The world moves, the big world moves, but so do the smaller worldswe inhabit. Contingency depends here, less on technological necessity than

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on historical imagination, positive or negative. Liberal democratic modernityoffers more room to move than the alternative modernities of fascism or com-munism, because of the tension built into its first two terms. The main valueof liberation is freedom; for democracy, equality is the highest value. Powerand democracy are in constant tension.

The mood in which Heller’s theory of modernity is offered is positive,and open. Its frame, the logics of modernity and its institutional relations,foreground the immediacy of personal lifeworlds, home, place, things. Shecloses A Theory of Modernity with an opening, for it is, in this way of thinking,easier to answer questions than to leave them open. The last lines read asfollows: ‘Postscript: perhaps I have answered too many questions – morethan I should have. If this is so, please re-translate my answers into so manynew questions’ (Heller, 1999: 235). Heller’s is a theory of modernity basedon democratic personality.

Which might return us, finally, to the question of the relative marginal-ity of her work. Perhaps the problem with most mainstream critical theory isthat it appeals because it combines the appearance of an immediately demo-cratic or mimetic attraction (‘here, you can deconstruct yourself’) with theromantic gloom characteristic of our time (‘nothing will change, it can onlyget worse’, for the others at least). The challenge of Heller’s work, in contrast,is after all closer to the spirit of Enlightenment and the real strength of its call,not only to think for yourself but to be, to act as yourself. This is a big ask.The call to autonomy is not easily heard in the Babel of noisier theorists.

Tucked away in a footnote, Heller’s Theory of Modernity also casts outa line to its own solitude:

It is not contingent which authors and works become ‘famous’, or prescribedreading, or themes for conferences, and quoted many times; many authors whoare neither worse nor less interesting than those who have ‘made it’, and yetthey remain entirely unknown, and rarely published. It becomes important, forexample, where one happens to be born. A man or woman who is born inParis has a thousand times greater opportunity to become prescribed readingthan a person born in Australia. Whom one knows, who is quoting someone,and who meets whom (by accident) are also important factors of selection.(Heller, 1999: 283n.19)

Budapest Central has more than one centre, just as does the railwaysystem of Melbourne or New York. Heller’s message is like the song of themetro busker, the chance encounter with the troubadour that makes you seethe world differently, even if just for a moment, as a new line of vision opensup. Everyday life has its own epiphanies. If you’re in the wrong centre, you’llrisk missing it, or hearing its echoes at a distance. You can walk on; youmight pause, read the book, imbibe the spirit of this most grateful commuterof modernities. There are crossroads in the underground, and not only in thelabyrinth; there are exits and arrivals, even after Auschwitz. There is thepresent. There is the gift.

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Peter Beilharz is Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory atLatrobe University. He is presently working on a four volume edition of AmericanPostwar Critical Theory for Sage Publications, and with George Ritzer on the SageEncyclopedia of Social Theory (2 volumes, 2004). [Email: P.Beilharz@latrobe.edu.au]

ReferencesBauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford: Blackwell.Fehér, F. and Heller, A. (1987) ‘Class, Democracy, Modernity’, in F. Fehér and A. Heller

Eastern Left, Western Left. Oxford: Polity.Fehér, F., Heller, A. and Markus, G. (1983) Dictatorship Over Needs. Oxford: Blackwell.Herf, J. (1984) Reactionary Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.Heller, A. (1976) The Theory of Need in Marx. London: Allison and Busby.Heller, A. (1982) A Theory of History. London: Routledge.Heller, A. (1993) A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.Heller, A. (1996) An Ethics of Personality. Oxford: Blackwell.Heller, A. (1999) A Theory of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.Heller, A. (2001) The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern

Imagination. Budapest: Collegium Budapest.

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