Barry Sandywell

The Myth of Everyday Life: Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of ‘the everyday’ within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression ‘everyday life’ points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully recognized how the ideology of ‘everyday life’ functions to suppress the materiality, contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’. A tradition of binary and dichotomous theorizing is uncovered as one of the fundamental sources of the myth of an ahistorical, unmediated everyday life. After mapping a range of more reflexive perspectives toward the investigation of ordinary life, the paper concludes on a positive and reconstructive note by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the dualisms and antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology to reveal the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich natural, incarnate, political, and reflexive imbrications.

Monsters in cyberspace cyberphobia and cultural panic in the information age

This paper explores popular attitudes toward the Internet (and computer-mediated communication more generally) by mapping some of the more threatening, transgressive and ‘monstrous’ images associated with cyberspace. An account of risk consciousness is developed in three parts: (1) comparisons with earlier information technologies reveals similarities and differences with regard to public attitudes toward cyberspace and its risks; (2) the development of a model of contemporary teratological space derived from images of boundary-dissolving threats, intrusive alterities and existential ambivalences created by the erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies; and (3) possible historical and sociological explanations of cyberpanic drawing on recent theorizations of globalization (capitalism/information society theory, risk society theory, reflexive modernization theory, and alterity theory).

Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin

This chapter pursues one thread of a complex skein of questions bearing upon the interrelationships between the concepts of nature, history and temporality in the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. Given the space available it has a limited set of objectives. First, to draw attention to the remarkable parallels between the speculations of Benjamin and Bakhtin with respect to what might be called the crisis of nature as this was experienced through the lens of the dialectical tradition from Hegel and Marx to Simmel, Lukacs and Western Marxism. Second, to briefly indicate how Benjamin and Bakhtin deconstructed the Natur/Geist dualisms of German social thought as one way of constructing a nonlinear, heterogeneous and ‘open’ image of nature and temporality. Finally, to suggest terms of reference for a more extensive exploration of the post-theological conception of nature in the work of these two thinkers.1

The Agonistic Ethic and the Spirit of Inquiry: On the Greek Origins of Theorizing

Reading the standard accounts of the origins of science, philosophy, and theorizing in ancient Greece might lead one to believe in the resilience of the idea of spontaneous generation — at least with respect to the question of the origins of forms of thought and inquiry. For example, traditional historians of philosophy appear to have a constitutive antipathy to the idea that the ‘world of thought and ideas’ — the realm of intellectual practices — is also a product of its time and place, shaped by wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures. It would seem that ‘the life of inquiry’ or ‘theorizing’ must be protected from all contamination with material and cultural mediations: thinking is an immanent faculty of the mind, with no connection to its social circumstances and historical contexts. Thus many traditional approaches to the origin of philosophy treat the practice of discursive reflection as an autonomous creation sprung fully formed, like Pallas Athena, from the brow of Zeus — but in this context ‘Zeus’ typically appears in the form of an appeal to ‘the Greek miracle’ or ‘the spirit of Greek genius’.

CRISIS OR RENEWAL? ON USING THE LEGACY OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Richard W. Hadden, Sociological Theory: An Introduction to the Classical Tradition. London: Broadview Press, 1997, paperback £17.95, 170 pp. ISBN 0-55111-095-4. John Holmwood, Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory. London and New York: Longman, 1996, paperback £12.50, x+141 pp. ISBN 0-582-29165-8. W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Volume III: Applied Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £50.00 (paperback £17.95), xvii+329 pp. ISBN 0-521-58801-4 pbk and 0-521-24960-0 hbk. Ian McIntosh, Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, £45.00 (paperback £14.95), 259 pp. ISBN 0-7486-0809-5 pbk and 0-7486-0873-7 hbk. Ian Craib, Classical Social Theory: An Introduction to the Thought of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, £40.00 (paperback £13.99) xxiv+297 pp. ISBN 0-19-878117-2 pbk and 0-19-878116-4 hbk.

Liberalism and Modern Society

This major new book is a wide-ranging analysis of the emergence and development of liberalism, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.