[artinfo] Ordinaryism: An Alternative to Accelerationism

[marc garrett]

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