Practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect

This paper describes how practices of judgement take place from within the ‘life’ of ‘everyday life’. It does this, in part, to counter the assumption that the expression of taste necessarily acts as a strategy of distinction that creates hierarchized relations between different types of body. Instead the paper argues that considering practices to be of everyday life involves attuning to how different modalities of the more-than-rational are bound up with the making of value. This means, however, refusing to suspect the making of a judgement. In contrast, the paper exemplifies an ethos of engagement that functions affectively to discern traces of something better in these most judged of practices. Practices of judgement with music are thereafter disclosed as concerned with the momentary (re)ordering of what William Connolly (1999 Connolly, W. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Google Scholar]) has termed ‘thought imbued intensities and feelings’. They occur from within the contradictory, often confused, affective imperatives that both circulate to pleat together everyday life and form the multiple, intersecting, topologies of affect that enact domestic time-space.