Thematization in everyday life: a critical approach

This paper presents an examination of some of the ways in which social criticism can be developed on the basis of the analysis of everyday life in modern societies. An attempt is made to combine the results of phenomenological (Schutz), ethnomethodological (Garfinkel), and dialectical (Kosik) approaches to the everyday world as the world-taken-for-granted, with the study, founded on semiological theory, of social images and the ideological elements implicit in them. At the centre of the discussion lies the mechanism of thematization by which the subjects assign predicates to persons, objects and events in a given social context.