ABSTRACT
In its turn to everyday experience and to the ordinary, we might see An Archive of Feelings as representative of what François Dosse, discussing the resurgence of the social sciences in France, identifies as the “descriptive turn.” In Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences, Dosse considers a turn to action, pragmatics, individual experience, and the social bond after the decline of structuralism and post-structuralism. He sees in this new work an attempt to find a “third way between the prevalence of pure lived experience and the priority of conceptualization” (1999 [1995], p. xvii). Contemporary scholars are
bringing attention back to what seems to be a matter of the order of evidence, of everydayness. To be sure, the critical paradigm had already founded its inquiries on a critique of the evidence of the everyday. But the mode of unveiling was fundamentally different because, in the case of the critical paradigm, it was a question of a denunciatory unveiling, whereas in the current orientations it is a matter of an understanding, of a recovery of the latent meaning that fills the everyday. The familiar, describable world, which participates in our environment, must then become problematic, an object of questioning, no longer a starting point but an end point of analysis.
