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Further thoughts on ordinariness

ordinary —

7 Jan 2010

From Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, p1:

Ordinary vices are the sort of conduct we expect, nothing spectacular or unusual...we are familiar with it...so commonplace that they are not worth discussing...one must suppose that everything that can be thought about it is too obvious to mention.

From Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p1-2:

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges...Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They're things that happen.
p3
Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures. They are the kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place.

[Stewart's is basically just a Foucauldian definition of social interaction. It literally just described being alive and, hence, everything. Meaningless. Shklar's definition more interesting because it doesn't say what is, in fact ordinary, but speaks to what we assume is ordinary, which is much closer to hitting it on the mark—a subjective interpretation of things in relation to what we are used to and thus do or do not take for granted. What can be classified as ordinary will differ depending on who you ask.]

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On extraordinary things

irrationality, ordinary, surprise —

6 Jan 2010

From Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8:

14. Whatever man thou meetest, put to thyself at once this question: What are this man's convictions about good and evil? For if they are such and such about pleasure and pain and what is productive of them, about good report and ill report, about death and life, it will be in no way strange or surprising to me if he does such and such things. So I will remember that he is constrained to act as he does.

15. Remember that, as it is monstrous to be surprised at a fig-tree bearing figs, so also is it to be surprised at the Universe bearing its own particular crop. Likewise it is monstrous for a physician or a steersman to be surprised that a patient has fever or that a contrary wind has sprung up.

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