Introduction

Summary

Each and every day we make ritual gestures, we move to the rhythm of external and personal cadences, we cultivate our memories, we plan for the future. And everyone else does likewise. Daily experiences are only fragments in the life of an individual, far removed from the collective events more visible to us, and distant from the great changes sweeping through our culture. Yet almost everything that is important for social life unfolds within this minute web of times, spaces, gestures, and relations. It is through this web that our sense of what we are doing is created, and in it lie dormant those energies that unleash sensational events.

This book deals with everyday life and tries to make sense of what individuals experience in it. A phenomenology of everyday experience is always as partial as the eye of the observer, but there can be no other point of departure for any investigation as to why, for us and so many others, things no longer ‘add up’: why is it that our routine gestures no longer are what they have been even in the recent past as we interact with different people, as we pass from one life ambit to another at work, at home, on holiday, or alone in solitude? And, above all, why is it so difficult to match the meaning of our behaviour with the words we use to name and recognize what we do?