Notes Toward a Speculative Methodology of Everyday Life

Abstract

This article considers the sociological role of activities that seem to make no sense: what can be learnt from episodes ‘unhinged’ from the routines of everyday life? In particular, stressing a processual framework for the study of everyday life, these unhinged episodes are regarded as useful for accessing its virtuality. The paper draws on literatures on everyday life, the object and the event in order, firstly to contrast critique to speculation, and secondly to sketch out what a speculative method for the study of everyday life might look like. Along the way, a number of concepts are developed: including affordance (the combination of plan, body and object); idiocy (a positive responsiveness to that which makes no sense); and affect (an ‘exquisite sensitivity to the world’). This perspective is illustrated through a discussion of how everyday practical issues raised by the use of rolling or wheeled luggage might evoke new forms of sociality – a ‘technosociality’.