[spectre] Ordinaryism: An Alternative to Accelerationism. Part 1 - Thanks for Nothing.

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

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