During the 20th century there were a number of calls for philosophy to return to everyday life in modernity so as to rescue it from its present alienation and, in turn, to save philosophy from irrelevance. The everyday is what philosophy traditionally sought to deny, and this elision of everyday life represents the denial of being human.

What we have inherited is an abstracted mode of philosophy and science (neo-classical economics) that is always located within the world of local and material actualities, but which implicitly disavows this location. and our own embodiment in the details of details of everyday life.

Everyday life, it was argued by Henri Lefebvre in Everyday Life in the Modern World, had become reified by ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’, which requires that philosophy return to everyday life, the intrinsically non-philosophical, from its abstractions and speculations, to sublate theory and practice and open the way for a radical freedom.

Often this proposal for an encounter between philosophy and everyday life that will be mutually transforming is one in which philosophy critiques everyday life; a proposal that fixes a one-way relation between everyday life and a discourse of philosophy, which transcends it. These proposals, eg. those of Heidegger, opt for the enrichment of philosophy over the enrichment of everyday life--ie., the organization and production of social time and space, and the questions associated with culture.

In contrast to continuing to attempt to deny and escape the conditions of humanity and bodily existence, we work to make them visible and to launch our critique from outside of academic disciplinary space. The lacunae of enriching everyday life can be addressed through a photography that both understands that everyday life constitutes the lived experience of the social world, and is linked to the theories of psychogeography, diversion and la derive (the drift) and the commodity-spectacle that lie at the center of the situationist project.

Such a photography and text ----in the form of a self published book---would recover the “concrete” against the abstractions of thought. It would be unfinished, fragmentary, exploratory and have different melodies and tonalities.