Now, being a semi-professional supposer, I knew that things would go much better if I had a name to cinch this kind of work together. I even thought I had a candidate. The phrase `cultural phenomenology' had been flapping about in my mind for some time. I had even tried it out in public, absurdly, can you believe, in an early draft for Birkbeck's submission to the Research Assessment Exercise in 1996. What we most distinctively did at Birkbeck, I alleged, was a style of thinking and writing about culture that allowed itself to stay closer to the grain of experience than had often been customary and that bypassed the categories and rubrics under which culture was generally investigated: what we did here, I announced, was cultural phenomenology. When they saw the draft, my colleagues politely, rightly, declined to be convened under this rubric, pointing out, among other objections, that in calling ourselves cultural phenomenologists, we would be committing ourselves either to the docile condoning or to the painstaking critique of a philosophical tradition that was at best in disrepair and at worst in considerable disrepute. We prudently ditched this particular advertising concept.

Still the phrase had now got rather pleasantly stuck in my teeth. (Since I was writing a book about ventriloquism at the time it was no doubt an advantage that it contained no tricky plosives and only one insignificant labial, so could easily be worked into ventriloquial routines.) Before I knew it, I was bandying it about with myself, and privately laying down the law about all the things that cultural phenomenology would and wouldn't, could and couldn't do.

If it were to come to exist, I said to myself, cultural phenomenology, would enlarge, diversify and particularise the study of culture. Instead of readings of abstract social and psychological structures, functions and dynamics, cultural phenomenology would home in on substances, habits, organs, rituals, obsessions, pathologies, processes and patterns of feeling. Such interests would be at once philosophical and poetic, explanatory and exploratory, analytic and evocative. Above all, whatever interpreting and explication cultural phenomenology managed to pull off might well be accomplished in the manner of its getting amid a given subject or problem, rather than the completeness with which it got on top of it. It would inherit from the phenomenological tradition an aspiration to articulate the worldliness and embodiedness of experience - the in-the-worldness of all existence. It would aim to sidestep the out-of-body experiences of cultural studies and even cultural materialism, to heed the affective, somatic dimensions of cultural experience, numbed and masked as these are by our ubiquitous, compulsory talk of `the body'. Its ancestors might include the antic forms of cultural analysis offered by some of the surrealists and Mass Observation.

If cultural phenomenology would mean a way of doing phenomenology to culture, it might also usefully put a bit of culture into phenomenology. Where the phenomenological tradition, in Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and even Sartre, is strikingly allergic to the consideration of collective or impersonal life, a cultural phenomenology of the kind I was here attempting to imagine would not be conceived as a mere enlargement of the cogito via an exculpation of the corporeal, but as a way of stirring reflection on the nature of collectivity and association. The word `cultural' in `cultural phenomenology' would suggest the importance of acknowledging that the ways in which the world presents itself for and is grasped by consciousness is an intersubjective way. To say that something is cultural is to say simultaneously that it is shared and that it is made. Culture, I resolved, means shared conditions of making. It means the experiencing of the world as a way of repeatedly making that world, and making it in common.

At the heart of my work of supposing was the principle that, instead of asking what things meant or where they necessarily led, cultural phenomenology could allow itself to ask the hair-raising and superstitiously proscribed question: what are things like? Of course, I expected to be ticked off for the arrogant naivety of believing, at this time of day, that experience was simply or directly accessible to this kind of enquiry. But I also found myself wondering where it was that we anti-empiricists and constructionists got our confidence that the evidence of those practices of representation and regulation of experience in which we were so interested led any more directly and perspicuously to the practices themselves than the evidence of experience led to experience itself. A diary, a joke, a leading article, a poem, a painting, and an act of parliament, are all evidence of the ordering of experience in different ways: but they are not the act of ordering itself. A text is not itself textualisation, but the to-be-interpreted trace of it. Cultural historians and hermeneuts are in the long-established business of taking bits of evidence and trying to work out what they are evidence of; and this is as true when your aim is to describe and analyse second-order constructions of experience as it is when your aim is to describe and analyse experience itself. So the actuality of `experience' is no more, and no less, necessarily a terra incognita than the historical actuality of what is done to experience, and you were no better, but also no worse off, in principle, trying to make sense of experience than you were in trying to make sense of the evidence of what is done to experience.

But there would be another, somewhat competing reason for the abatement of orthodox suspicions about the impossibility of gaining access to experience. The aim of cultural phenomenology would not be to raise up the authentic, lived, prereflective body of experience from the carapace of analysis and explication, because it would not believe there is any such authentic, lived, prereflective body. This unbelief about the authentic body, or the primordial nature of one's embodied relation to the world, might help stay cultural phenomenology from the effort to drench itself in esseity. And this would be because, for cultural phenomenology, to explain culture is partly to bring it about. Culture is neither raw experience on the one hand, nor finished explanation on the other; it is experience becoming explanation, experiencing experienced as a way of explaining, in something of the way posited by William James in his account of the ways in which `pure experience' gets sifted and knitted into categories like world and self, me and you, now and then. Cultural phenomenology, said I, would attempt to grasp, synthesise, transform and be itself seized by the processes of explanation which are always astir within experiences, processes and objects.

Particularly, as it chanced, for me, objects. I wanted to imagine a way of writing about objects that would attend to their peculiar and changeable life in our lives. I dreamed of a way of thinking through things rather than thinking them through. I imagined, for instance, that it might be possible to say interesting and precise things about our relation to the many quasi-objects of our intimately, or extimately, technologised world - dashboards, joysticks, screens, wires, keyboards, mouses, say, and what they did to and with hand, eye and skin - that would start from somewhere else than the to-hand folksiness of the woodcutter's axe or the cobbler's needle, or the abstract allure of `the commodity'.

Having defined cultural phenomenology in a way that ran the amiable risk of including nearly everybody and everything, the zealot by now swelling in me now needed a way to make sure that only the rigorously elect could follow me into the wilderness. And so I began paving my via negativa.

Because cultural phenomenology would avoid the reduction of the plurality and analytic nonsaturability of cultural experience to common currencies and finalising formulae of all kinds, it would need to keep well-stoked its irritability about academic language.It would need to eschew that hunched defensiveness which characterises contemporary critical writing. Cultural phenomenologists would have to promise themselves not to write in such boring and bullying ways. I even wrote out a scheme of lexical detoxification for myself. Out would go all my favourite poisons and performance-enhancers: difference, transgression and radical undecidability, along with all their friends and relations. I hoped, not for a regime of discursive clean living, but for muckier writing, more mauled by doubt and discovery.

Too much contemporary cultural theory and analysis seemed to have taken its motto from Baden-Powell: be prepared. Cultural phenomenology would have to be prepared to be unprepared. It would take care to steer clear from precomprehended problems, under rubrics such as power, identity, ideology, gender, sexuality, `race', ` "race" ', ethnicity, the body, or postmodernism, and would do what it could not to consent to the ordering and containing effects of those forms of thought.

Even more importantly than declining the airline-English of theorytalk, cultural phenomenologists would also have to resist the monochrome conformity of tone and mood characteristic of academic writing about culture across the humanities and social sciences, allowing themselves to write in a much wider range of tunings and entablatures. The idea would be to show that thinking could go in moods and modes other than those of jaw-jutting denunciation or stern homily: that one might write in more excitable, inflammatory, absorbed and perplexed ways, and even, and currently most unthinkable of all, otherwise than from the conviction that there must be a happy ending to all this.

And so I had my cultural phenomenology. Appropriately for such an immaculately instanceless phenomenon, my essay had its principal being in virtual form for a while, as a hypertext on my website. Indeed, those who prefer a more fidgety kind of read can still drop in on it at here.

But then one or two others began to indicate to me their interest in the idea of cultural phenomenology. Libertarians and primitivists emailed me with alarming congratulations. David Trotter made me see that there might be reasons for a more sober, sustained and generally grown-up re-engagement by cultural critics and historians with the fishily-neglected work of second-generation phenomenologists like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. After a talk I gave at the Institute for English Studies, Tim Armstrong gently told me that lots of people were already up to the rare and sinless things I was affecting to summon out of thin air. (I quickly added a paragraph to my web essay insisting that this is what I had been saying all along.) The journal Parallax tried to poke people into spasms of denunciation, but could find nobody who thought it worth disagreeing with anything I had written. The recent announcement of the solemnly-named Journal of Mundane Studies seems to make it clear that there is growing interest in the kinds of insignificant or unmarked social behaviour in which I am interested, an interest the pedigree and prospects of which are discussed by Stephen Clucas in his essay in this issue. I didn't know whether to feel proved right, ripped off (but then, if you squat in front of a bowl of small change with a sign reading `please take generously', what do you expect?), or humiliatingly come-lately.

The most important abstention of cultural phenomenology would be the abstention from wholehoggery. Being a cultural phenomenologist was not a matter of lifestyle or religious conviction. There were no necessary outcomes or concomitants to it, nor any guarantees of what it would do for you, or anyone else. You would be mad to think you could do cultural phenomenology all the time; equally, it would be unlikely that you could help doing something passably resembling it, from time to time, whether you meant to or not. Fun though it was to imagine starting my own gang, and demanding a conker and a frog from everyone wanting to join, I knew I was not going to be able to make any of this stick. So, if this is the kind of work that is coming to be done, it may turn out to be worth while to have a think about it, once, if ever, it has been.