Ordinaryism: An Alternative to Accelerationism. Part 1 - Thanks for
Nothing.
A new article on Furtherfield by Robert Jackson.
Just think about the ordinary, and by that I mean not an ordinary life,
event, custom, or thing (at least not yet), but the ordinary as such.
We can never fully exhaust the ordinary - how could we? For as sure as
we try to get close, the ordinary becomes something else. Elusive - in
the same way that words, peoples, names and symbols become strange if we
concentrate on them too long. Neither does anyone grasp the ordinary in
sheer ignorance, because its ordinariness just evaporates in retrospect.
The ordinary claims little attention only because it is ordinary and is
implicitly taken on that account. The extraordinariness of the ordinary
has to be rejected if its implicitness becomes something we unavoidably
accept. Yet, its givenness appears unproblematic insofar as it remains
unacknowledged. The ordinary is what happens when we’re concentrating on
something else: it is what constitutes the ontological furniture of the
world.
Nevertheless, the ordinary remains drastically important, as it always
was: and yet its implicitness already remains curiously forgotten,
waiting to be exposed or made present. As Charles Bernstein writes in
The Art and Practice of the Ordinary, “any attempt to fix the ordinary
pulls it out of the everydayness in which it is situated, from which it
seems to derive its power.” Representations and objectifications of the
ordinary claim transparency to its own cost.
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/ordinaryism-alternative-accelerationism-part-1-thanks-nothing
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