I have begun a new research project on common sense. I will be returning to some of the early critiques of common sense as ideology and hegemony in cultural studies. As historian Sophie Rosenfeld notes, “The historicity of our seemingly timeless natural common sense was also in the 1970 and 1980s a frequent theme of cultural theorists from Roland Barthes to Stuart Hall” (2011, 260). I will be reflecting on how and why many different scholars have used common sense to make sense of complex histories and social realities. Some important formulations include Black common sense (Wahneema Lubiano), colonial and settler colonial common sense (Ann Stoler and Mark Rifkin); racialised common sense (Avtar Brah and Himani Bannerji); native common sense (Manulani Aluli Meyer); cisgender common sense (Robin Dembroff) and queer common sense (Kara Keeling and Pamela L. Geller).

Why common sense, why now? In 2020 Tory MP John Hayes set up a new lobby group called the “Common Sense Group,” which has since expanded to include over 50 conservative members. The core mission of this group is to reclaim Britain, defined in terms of the people’s will, the common good, and the national interest from the hands of those deemed extremists. Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and Kill the Bill are all named on their website as “subversives fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and dictate the future.” Since forming, the group has produced a book, Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age. The preface to the book is written by the reverend, Michael Nazir-Ali. He describes how common sense came to mean, “good judgement which is not easily swayed by intellectual or cultural fads and takes a realistic view of ourselves and what is around us. In philosophy, this view was vigorously defended by the analytical philosopher, G. E. Moore, who held that when a philosophical view is in conflict with Common Sense, it is more likely that the view was in error rather than that Common Sense had gone astray. He gave the example of knowing that his hand existed and was his as being more certain than any sceptical attempts to show that such was not the case. Moore’s argument can, of course, be legitimately extended to our knowledge of our body as a whole and to the different parts of it and their purpose. It could also be extended to our knowledge of our relationships, their meaning and purpose and, indeed, to the social structures and institutions which provide coherence and stability to the social order.” In defining common sense as good judgement but also as “a realistic view,” of ourselves and what is around us, Nazir-Ali positions himself as inheritor of that view and of a specific philosophical tradition. If Moore famously held up his hand in defence of common sense, a defence of common sense is in fact the title of one of his most well known essays, Nazir-Ali makes use of Moore’s hand, moving from the philosopher’s certainty that “this is my hand,” to his own certainty about the nature of bodies and their purposes, the coherence and stability of relationships, social structures and institutions. The social order becomes like that hand, or an extension of it, what by being there is evidence of the folly of intellectual or cultural fads, or of scepticism.

In this project I want to explain how common sense can be defended by appealing to a hand (or, following a different tradition, to a table). I hope to offer a queer phenomenological exploration of the many senses of common sense. I think of Stuart Hall’s evocative description of how “what passes as common sense feels as if it has always been there.” Appealing to what has always been there, an appealing with feeling, can take the form of an appeal to what is real or obvious to anyone with common-sense. These appeals are made all the more, the more reality seems to be slipping away, the more some seem to be losing their hand. The archives of common sense are thus full of moments of loss (of certainty, of solidity, also identity) and disruption. In the project I explore how binary sex as well as racial purity become commonsensical notions or even feelings (following Hannah Arendt, I am interested in the role of common-sense in creating “the sensation of reality”) and hope to explain how and why “reality” is being re-weaponised as a “war against the woke.” I will return to some of my arguments in Queer Phenomenology (2006) about the significance of disorientation, how things appear slantwise, out of line or become wonky. I will also develop the framework of “complaint as a queer method,” which I introduced in Complaint! (2021). I had noticed from listening to different people’s stories of complaint, how there is something queer about the experience. Words that are everywhere in my data are surreal, odd, bizarre, strange and weird. Those who complain are often treated as “rocking the boat,” as if they are trying to cause disruption. In my common sense project, I am interested in how a sense of reality is shared over time, a sharing that is achieved, which is both technical and practical, and what we learn from those moments when that sense of reality is disrupted. I will explore how some of us, or some of our actions, come to disrupt other people’s sense of shared reality.