This document provides an introduction and overview of the book "Ordinary Lives" by Ben Highmore. It discusses three main themes explored in the book: aesthetics, humanism, and intimacy in everyday life. For aesthetics, the everyday involves emotional responses shaped by external sensations and perceptions rather than internal states. For humanism, the book adopts a view of being human that questions human nature without seeking definitive answers. For intimacy, everyday life involves close material and sensory experiences as well as a complex intermingling of private and public through modern media. The book aims to aesthetically map ordinary objects, explain the structuring of time, discuss media as distraction, and consider the political dimensions of everyday aesthetics.

1. introduction / ordinary lives ben highmore | 2011

3. everything can become ordinary: the greatest blessing and the greatest handicap

4. everyday is the accumulation of small things becoming an expansive and hard-to-register big thing

5. everyday is the field of experience in continuous flux

6. deCerteau-ian: rather than pin-pointing its characteristic content, just draw its grammar

8. ‘real’ nothing: drifting – the observational stage that everyday is forgotten, or realized unimportant??

9. modernity causes an existential loss that it fills with the agitated spectacular culture of the modern (Charney, 1998)

11. “the ordinary speaks of the commonality without necessarily intoning the ideological set pieces of the silent majority.” (p.5) – deCertau’s marginality of the majority & the ability of the everyday to connect anything that is extraordinary and taking them to the background

12. ordinariness is a process where things pass from unusual stage to usual stage

13. creativity is the daily business of making sense of what’s around us... – like Williams (p.7)

14. ... or seeing the possiblity of adventure in ordinary – like Stewart (p.8)

15. this book focuses on areas of routine and habit with

18. for Althusser, there is no way to escape idealism by taking man as both subject and object

19. for Foucault, by erasing “man” from cultural studies, replacements like discourse, power and apparatus will appear for “human nature”

20. Highmore believes that human is a “heuristic device for an experimental approach to life that is dedicated to the process of species-becoming rather than to the fulfillment of a foregone destiny”

23. with the mobilisation of intimacy in the modern world, cold intimacy is produced

25. thanks for listening