Eigensinn (Eigen-Sinn)

Definition

Eigensinn — literally "one's own sense" or "own meaning," written as Eigen-Sinn to stress that root — is Alf Lüdtke's key analytical term for a form of working-class everyday behaviour that is neither open resistance nor passive adaptation. The source's glossary defines it as:

"willfulness, spontaneous self-will, a kind of self-affirmation, an act of (re)appropriating alienated social relations on and off the shop floor by self-assertive prankishness, demarcating a space of one's own." (Glossary, p. 313)

It is "semantically linked to aneignen (appropriate, reappropriate, reclaim)" and, in standard parlance, carries pejorative overtones of "obstreperous, obstinate" behaviour. Analytically, Eigensinn names the third path — alongside (rare) open opposition and (widespread) silent complaisance — that workers took under factory discipline and, later, under fascism: "variants of eigensinnige movements of evasion" that "occupied 'space' and 'time' for themselves" (Lüdtke, p. 226). Crucially, it is not heroic: "Eigensinn remained integrated into calculated work—or interrupted the flow of that work, but only for a few moments" (p. 228).

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the concept's author: Eigensinn as the everyday practice that mediated between the "widespread option of silent complaisance" and "open opposition," rooted in shop-floor horseplay, pranks, and "willful distance" from both superiors and workmates.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the adjacent concept of habitus and the "class-specific body"; Lüdtke warns that habitus's schemata can appear "little amenable to change," whereas Eigensinn insists on movement.
• Michel de Certeau — the tactical/practice tradition Eigensinn parallels, though Lüdtke resists reading it as resistance.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography in which Eigensinn is the signature concept.
• Complaisance — its companion-twin: the wait-and-see toleration of domination that Eigensinn punctuates but does not overturn.
• Workers' Culture — the culture of material praxis in which Eigensinn is expressed (Kaschuba's horseplay and body language).
• Appropriation / Aneignung — the reappropriation to which Eigen-Sinn is semantically linked.
• Habitus — the dispositional concept Eigensinn both uses and exceeds.
• Everyday Life — the sphere in which Eigensinn operates.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the primary source: the glossary definition (p. 313); Lüdtke's "Profiles of Cooperation and Eigensinn" (pp. 226–228) on pranks, evasion and calculated work; the analysis of complaisance, detachment and the "third approach" (pp. 226, 235–238); Kaschuba's parallel account of horseplay and body language as workers' culture (pp. 182–185).

Open Questions

• Is Eigensinn a politically meaningful category or a safety valve? Lüdtke explicitly refuses "a renewed heroization of proletarian grit" (p. 227) — does the concept then explain anything the older notion of "everyday resistance" does not?
• If Eigensinn "remained integrated into calculated work," can it ever accumulate into collective action, or is it by definition momentary?
• How does Eigensinn relate to the design-theoretical reader's appropriation and de Certeau's tactics — is it a German cousin, or a distinct concept?