In times of crisis—war, pandemic, severe disruptions of supply chains, climate apocalypse, systemic erasure of reproductive autonomy—there might seem to be no meaningful distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Yet after the cultural emphasis on catastrophe in the last few years, a return to the ordinary is overdue. What role can critical thought on ordinary language, affect, and aesthetics now play in interrogating the evolving concept of ordinariness, imagining alternative ordinaries, and expanding our geographies and objects of study? Additionally, what are the limits of critical theory for understanding and communicating about ordinary experience?

The concept of ordinariness is currently resurging as an area of critical attention—in anthropology, with Veena Das’s Textures of the Ordinary (2020); in literary studies, with Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary (2017) and Nancy Yusef’s The Aesthetic Commonplace (2022); in Black studies, with Christina Sharpe’s upcoming Ordinary Notes (2023). The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Annie Ernaux, who is known for writing about her ordinary life experiences as a woman in France. Is attending to the ordinary always emancipatory, or does ordinariness also function as a normative force to compel conformity?

How do ordinary acts of language—lying, apologizing, complaining, gossiping, flirting—reveal and reconfigure relations of power between speakers and hearers? What would it mean to revisit what ordinary language is and who is able to use language in ordinary ways? Ordinary language philosophy as originally developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell pays insufficient attention to how power delimits speech. However, feminist philosophers of language have expanded their work to explore how gendered and racialized power differentials systemically prevent certain speakers from performing the speech acts they intend. Still, more must be done to develop a truly critical account of how language ordinarily operates. In particular, how do works that challenge the cultural dominance of English—like Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! (2018)—put pressure on theories of the linguistic ordinary that are conceived in a narrowly Anglo-American context?

Several decades after the publication of canonical critiques of everyday life by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007) have turned our attention to how the affective responses that aesthetic forms generate make the structures of the ordinary palpable. Yet, in the Global South, making the status quo felt necessitates different aesthetic strategies for negotiating the boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary—which Euro-American frameworks have perceived as “magical realism.” In relation to theories and genres arising in a variety of cultural and geopolitical contexts, what are the affective outcomes of making the strange ordinary, or the ordinary strange? 

New theoretical possibilities for understanding the ordinary emerge in sites that evade critical attention. For example, since 2014, the Japanese website dailyportalz has sponsored a “Mundane Halloween” contest encouraging participants to dress up as extremely ordinary things, like “person who accidentally shook their carbonated beverage before opening it” and “person in line at a convenience store.” How might contemporary forms of social media, popular culture, and video games be deployed as the means of producing new theories of ordinariness?

We offer these provocations as an invitation to consider the possibilities and limits of ordinariness, and invite scholars to help us engage the term anew. Send submissions to quiparlejournal@gmail.com by September 1, 2023. Submissions should not exceed 36 double-spaced pages and should be typed in a standard font.