Ben Highmore

1. Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore
ZELİHA UYURCA
ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

2. Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Outline
Science of Singularity
Neoliberalism
Ordinary Habits: Keep calm and Carry on
Habit, Keeping on keeping on

3. Science of Singularity
Richness of Ordinary Lives (Particularity of examples)
The Habitat Chair (specific examples) representing a world of chair sitters
entagled with
More ordinary life and forces (only visible when they shape our practises and passions)
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

4. Neoliberalism Singularity
Formative Neoliberalism in Britain
Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of Britain)
Provided the conditions for form of individualism – still shaping global finances and global culture.
Stated that:
• There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people, and the
beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to
take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those
who are unfortunate.(Thatcher in Keay 1987: 8–9)
You are on your own in both failure and success.
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

5. Neoliberalism Singularity
Neoliberalism:
•Not a simple name given specific governments (Covernment of Conservative Party, Republicans)
•Political Form
Govermentality: (As Anna McCarthy suggest)
•A concept – providing a powerful model for understanding the cultural and political manifestation of
neoliberalism.
• Name for a collective fashioning of the self, which works on an aesthetic register, shaping
emotional and sensorial experience.
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

6. Affect and Emotion
•Affective life of people, and sensual and sensible descriptions of cultural and
social life.
•affect and emotion with an interest in the senses and with the experience… as time and
memory in the name of a more general social aesthetics.
“Does such an orientation occlude politics?”
(“Science of singularity” is actually symptomatic of neoliberal culture itself.)
may not be incompatible with the individualizing tendencies of neoliberalism.
“What sort of a politics could „a science of singularity‟ carry on its necessarily
narrow shoulders?”
Modest and experimental and involves a sense of how an aeshetic of ordinary life could be
invoked for a world that seems simultaneously fragile,capricious and conformist.
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

7. Ordinary Habits: Keep Calm and Carry on
Govermentality Ordinary, Habit, Everyday Life
Establishing
Altering Habits Keeping up Habits
New Habits
9/11 Attacks in NY.
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

8. Keep on Keeping on
• how consistently people seem to live their everyday lives under conditions
of catastrophe:
•...people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep in which they are
conscious of nothing except the daily round of work…(Orwell 1945: 435)
• not let the extraordinary overcome the world of the ordinary.
What about Without Habit:
•Uprising of poor, no miners in the darkness,…
Habit:
•maintains the status quo and the inequalities of its structure and expression
•ability of human life to be transformed
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore

9. Habit
• potential for change, for adjustment (the „becoming‟ of habit),
• coupled with its conventionalizing and conservative power. This conflict is
irreconcilable.
• To imagine culture is to imagine a culture of habit as a dynamic set of features that
includes established habits and the becoming of the habitual.
• The work of an aesthetic politics of the ordinary may be to produce imaginative acts
For thinking the seemingly impossible: a culture that encourages habits of generosity
and world-enlarging improvisation and adaptation, while also maintaining habits of
comfort and stability.
Towards a Political Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore