Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the Everyday

TLDR

Social analysis has recently turned its attention to the body. The paper examines how this focus on embodiment reshapes social analysis. The author discusses embodiment’s elusory nature and its role in sense‑making, while critiquing its marginalisation in social analysis and subjectification. The study argues that everyday performative, collective, and material embodiment should be understood through enaction and immanence, revealing the groundlessness of being and the overlooked influence of habit and style on subjectification.

Abstract

Recently social analysis has turned its attention to ‘the body’. In this paper the author considers the implications of such a turn for social analysis itself. The main discussion of the paper concerns the indeterminate or ‘elusory’ nature of embodiment and its productive relation to ‘sense making’ in everyday life and contemplative thought. The author examines how these aspects of embodiment have been marginalised within social analysis and the effects of this marginalisation in understandings of subjectification. Describing the processes of subjectification in terms of ‘habit’ and ‘style’, the author suggests that the disclosive and performative in the everyday have been ignored in favour of a search for the foundations of the everyday and the subject. An argument is put forward for the groundlessness of being in terms of its potential to be otherwise. The above discussions are described in terms of the ability of collectives to make sense from the fleeting and ephemeral feelings and experiences of everyday on-going comportment. Finally it is suggested that through a consideration of the performative, collective, and material nature of embodiment contemplations of everyday life should be understood in terms of enaction and immanence.