Patchwork (Gemengelage)

Definition

Gemengelage — rendered as "patchwork" or "composite mixture" — is the term Lüdtke uses for the jumbled simultaneity of heterogeneous, even contradictory, elements in historical experience and practice. The concept rests on Marx's notion of "uneven" (unegal) change: "Attention directed to the 'uneven' change (K. Marx) in forms of production or modes of interpretation reveals that opportunities for action by historical subjects were jumbled together in a kind of 'patchwork' (Gemengelage) with the limitations on such action" (Lüdtke, p. 16). Gemengelage "allows for reckoning the synchronisms of different if not contradictory moments which may coexist without necessarily being mediated or directly linked to each other" (p. 16). The patchwork is what the miniature renders three-dimensional: "Collages or mosaics can help make individual layers or nodes within societal 'patchwork' structures three-dimensional and plastic" (p. 21). In Lüdtke's fascism chapter the patchwork is the very texture of workers' lives: "The decisive element here is not an 'either-or' of cooperation or conflict, self-willed distance or affection. Rather, the 'patchworks' were the shaping factor" (p. 227).

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the concept's author, against both teleological and "totality" accounts of historical process.
• Karl Marx — the "uneven development" thesis that grounds it.
• Ernst Bloch — "non-contemporaneity" (Ungleichzeitigkeit) as the philosophical background (Bloch's Heritage of Our Times is cited at p. 34 n. 35).
• Pierre Bourdieu — habitus as a system that can express contradictory positions without the subject's awareness.
• Lutz Niethammer — the "composite mixtures" of GDR experience ("reale Gemengelagen").

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the field whose picture of the past the patchwork underwrites.
• Eigensinn — one patchwork strand in workers' behaviour.
• Lebensweise — the structural frame the patchwork resists flattening into.
• Historical Experience — the composite mixture of experience.
• Habitus — the means by which contradictory social positions coexist in the person.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's Introduction (pp. 15–17, 21); the "Profiles of Cooperation and Eigensinn" section (p. 227); "the synchronism of politicization and privatization" (p. 231); Niethammer's "reale Gemengelagen" (p. 263) and "composite mixtures" (p. 262).

Open Questions

• Is Gemengelage a substantive claim about historical reality or an interpretive device for refusing generalization? Its defenders would say the two are inseparable.
• Does the patchwork concept license a quietist relativism — everything coexists, nothing determines — or does it retain, via Marx's "uneven development," a materialist anchor?