ABSTRACT
The structure of modern sensory experience is inherently ironic. The sensory sphere is experienced in such a manner that profound transformations occurring in it or imposed on it are rendered imperceptible to the individual eye. This is precisely why everyday life in modernity has become the site for far-reaching historical transformations. The polarity between the sensational and the mundane is also the dichotomy between the sensational and the sensory in which the latter is left unmarked, unvoiced and unattended to, as a banal element of the everyday. This division distinguishes the anonymous flow of the everyday from that which is culturally politically and biographically set aside as notable and discursive. The split between public and private memory, the narrated and unnarrated, inadvertently reveals the extent to which everyday experience is organized around the reproduction of inattention, and therefore the extent to which a good deal of historical experience is relegated to forgetfulness.
