Beyond the Everyday

Abstract

BEYOND THE EVERYDAY Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, London, Routledge, 2010, 208pp; paperback, £20.99Ben Highmore edited die 2002 andiology The Everyday Life Reader (Roudedge) that first brought him to the attention of readers on bodi sides of the Atlantic. That collection was among a handful of books highlighting the importance of everyday life in studies of culture, and Highmore's capable editorship introduced readers to the most influential positions on the myriad ways that everyday life simultaneously functions as the terrain of the taken-for-granted as well as die experiential realm in which struggles over meaning, selfhood, belonging, and politics are actively waged. In contextualizing the work of a very wide range of figures - all the way from Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Leon Trotsky, \NA ter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, to Kristin Ross, Erving Goffman, and Mary Kelly - the 2002 collection provides an indispensable archive of statements about the everyday that informs any work done today on the topic. For this reason, his recent single-authored monograph taking up some of the same issues surrounding ordinary life - this time exclusively in his own voice - is once more of interest to readers drawn to the 'stuff' of daily existence.Between the earlier andiology and his new work, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, Highmore has written three other monographs on related subjects; so perhaps the current study constitutes something of a summary position on the everyday, an attempt both to take its measure conceptually and to promote its legitimacy as a properly aesthetic object. The book reflects his long-standing focus on die everyday and there is a good deal to learn from it; by the same token, there is also much with which to take issue.If we first consider its strengths, Ordinary Lives reprises the question of experience, looking to sharpen its status as an analytic category: how to think it, how to value it and, above all, how to situate it in relation to aesthetics (as a disciplinary mode of knowing and also as a form of being-in-the-world). Highmore does this by usefully situating historical and philosophical conceptions of the aesdiedc - and aesthetics - from Alexander Baumgarten's eighteenth-century ideas to the propositions spread across several volumes of Jacques Ranciere's contemporary writings. In between, Highmore is assiduous in citing the scholarship on aesthetics that bears on concrete studies of daily experience and its theorization in the discursive registers of cultural and media studies, symbolic anthropology, psychoanalysis, architecture/urban studies and, of course, philosophy. I say 'of course' because in Baumgarten's time aesthetics was only understood as a subset of philosophy per se, but also because aesthetic considerations are today a common feature of philosophical discourse at large, whether in political philosophy (Heidegger, Arendt, Ranciere) or its socio-cultural counterparts (Adorno, Benjamin).What Ordinary Lives elaborates most successfully is the texture and richness of the aesthetic as an epistemological and experiential concept. So, for instance, it is refreshing to be reminded via Michel de Certeau that a classical conception of aesthetics would have subsumed the senses within it - such that 'leading the good life' would include in its meanings passion as much as reflection. This emphasis allows Highmore to promote a return to an earlier conception of the aesthetic, one that rests on everyday experience and ordinary activities rather than on that which has categorically been separated from necessity, feeling, and practicality. In this sense, the project Highmore pursues makes its bid against Immanuel Kant's proposition of 'disinterested contemplation' as well as the epistemological priority given in the Kantian system to 'pure intuition' as appearance (Anschauung).With that said, the author's engagement with Kant is glancing at best, although he does provide a fuller discussion of the ideas of Kant's Scottish interlocutor, David Hume. …