Common Sense and Sensibility. A Feminist Critique of (Public) Knowledge

"The battle over common sense is a central part of our political life" states Stuart Hall (2013) and - as I will show in this paper - it is as well a central part of our private life. To do so, this paper proposal discusses (1) the extent to which common sense is constitutive for the private/public divide, (2) deconstructs common sense (hidden) gendered dimensions, (3) and asks which critical re-readings of common sense feminist theory offers. The paper understands common sense as an unquestioned formation of public reason and knowledge, which, through private everyday life, is inscribed in the subjects to the extent that this knowledge becomes habits guiding the subject's actions and vice versa. Common sense reveals what is considered normal and desirable, and thus livable, in a particular society at a particular point in time. In terms of political theory, common sense is a key concept in political thought from Greek antiquity to postmodernism (cf. Rosenfeld 2011). Numerous political theorists have worked on (the public dimension of) common sense: René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes. What these approaches have in common - although they range from normative to socio-critical - is that the recourse to the universally common in common sense fails to recognize its fixation of social power relations, and thus the gendered dimension of common sense remains a blank space in all approaches. However, the gendered and thus private dimension of common sense is constitutive of the public meaning, the political conceptualizing of common sense - as the paper demonstrates through selected examples: Immanuel Kant conceptualizes common sense as sufficient for the house (the private). So his understanding of common sense serves for the demarcation between practical and theoretical knowledge, which reacts with the demarcation between the private and the public (cf. Jehle 2001). Antonio Gramsci conceptualizes common sense as a form of thinking, feeling, and perceiving and thus shows the constitutive (but hidden) affective dimension of this formation of reason and knowledge. Here, the complicated relationship between reason and affect or emotion and their meaning for the public/private divide continues to be determinant. Thus, the proposal makes a strong case for the possibilities of feminist critical re-readings of these understandings of common sense and thus to reveal it’s re-shapening of the public and the private. To this end, feminist critical re-readings contrast the hegemonic interpretations of common sense by the main- and malestream with feminist standpoint theories (Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins) and affect theories (Brigitte Bargetz, Sara Ahmed).