Highmore, Ben (2011) ‘Introduction’ in Ordinary Lives,pp.: 1-20.
1. ORDINARY LIVES
BEN HIGHMORE 2011
METU Faculty of Architecture Department of Industrial Design
ID501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design
Cengiz Hakan Gürkanlı
4. v
POINT OF VIEW TO ORDINARY LIVES
This book seeks to explore ordinary aspects of
aesthetics, humanism and intimacy with their
overlaps and also with their contradictions and
discords.
Everyday is a field of experience constantly in flux.
To understanding the material actuality of
everyday life as it lived out in work and
domestic environments.
5. v
ORDINARY LIVES
Somewhere someone is dying, someone is being
born, someone is making love; somewhere a war is
being fought. Midwives and morticians, paupers and
princes go about their everyday lives.
“Everything can become everyday, everything can
become ordinary it is our greatest blessing, our most
human accomplishment, our greatest handicap, our
most despicable complacency.”
Nothing is really on the foreground of experience.
Dynamic simultaneity of desire and its sublimations
of confidence and its undoing, of concentration and
its dispersal require a mode of description that is
more tuned to orchestration than the ascription of
meaning
7. NOTHING MUCH
Much is too much
actually.
Endless inner speech.
Thousands of thoughts
Can be described as
‘drifting’.
The drift isn’t the emptiness of ordinary, but the
ordinary submerged, hiding in and expanse of shadows.
8. NOTHING MUCH
TV advertisements, soup operas, and reality shows
throws shadows over the day-to-day-ness of ordinary
life.
The ordinary seems can only be grasped as problem,
as something in need of management.
The drift isn’t the emptiness
of ordinary, but the ordinary
submerged, hiding in and
expanse of shadows.
9. ORDINARY LIVES ORDINARY LIFE
The Oxford English Dictionary reunites the term with a
range of meanings that exceed the reduced sense of
ordinary as a depleted form of life.
WHAT IS ORDINARY ?
In 18th century “an ordinary”
was a meal in French (The dish
of the day).
Freshest produce, best cuts of
the meat.
An ordinary suggests both care
and effort of the cook and
community of diners.
10. ORDINARY LIVES ORDINARY LIFE
BEING ORDINARY
BECOMING ORDINARY
One person’s ordinary is
another person’s
extraordinary.
“Ordinary” is the world
pulsing with life in its
every singularity.
In hierarchical
societies, novelty is
seen as a positive
value and ordinary is
often regarded as
lowly status. For
Example: Scottish
higher education
system where an
“ordinary” degree is
lower of two classes.
Yet ordinariness as
this book hopes to
demonstrate is also
a positive value, an
accomplishment.
11. AESTHETICS
Emotions comes from 'without`
not from `within`. Emotional life
bubbles up from our “inner
selves”.
Four Quailites of Aesthetic Thinking.
1st
Posits emotions and affects as
social, collective and exterior. Yet
they are experienced as deeply
personal.
Passionate life is learnt through
the outward orientations of
sympathy and empathy.
12. AESTHETICS
Passions are not passive states of
being they are modes of action and
orientation.
2nd
If passions are not always actions
themselves they are prequels to
actions.
The passions are orientations, forms
of attunement to the world.
We pursue pleasure, turn away from
pain. If we are lead a “virtuous life”
we need to purse the good and avert
the evil.
13. AESTHETICS
Aesthetics is an ambitious attempt to
approach the human creature as a
psychological, physiological and
ethnical being through being attuned
to sensations, senses, perception and
sentiments.
3rd
Aesthetics in some senses; was likely
to be a utopian arena where virtue
and pleasure were united. But in the
real world discrimination of objects of
the passions are conservative and
bent on preserving the authority of
the property owning classes.
14. AESTHETICS
Aesthetics turns towards “style” as
something deeply social and
significant. Over last 20 years
broadcasters, critic academics and
entertainers have associated the
word “style” with “lifestyle” and
established the latter as a
consumer choice.
4th
15. HUMANISM
According to Louis Althusser: “By taking man as both subject
and object of knowledge, would always be caught in the grip of
idealism” The earlier idealist philosophy depended in all its
domains and arguments on a problematic of “human nature”
.For centuries, this problematic had been transparency itself,
and no one had thought of questioning it even its internal
modifications. Even if human nature was the object of
investigation it was always established as a known entity in
advance of such investigation.
For Foucault, in a bid to erase man from the study of culture,
replacements to human nature would be found in such terms
as ‘discourse’, ‘power’, and ‘apparatus’. RELIGION, MYTH, MAGIC.
16. HUMANISM
For Roger Smith, “ Historical knowledge of belief about what is
human is knowledge of being human and this is because ‘writing
about being human.. .therefore constructs what is to be human’
Sort of humanism for Ben Highmore:
“ One that seeks to address the question of human nature,
but one that doesn’t want to call time on history, one that
refuses to seek the answers simply in, what at the moment
passes for, “best” knowledge.
