Research Report: Refiguring the Ordinary

By Andrew Kalaidjian, Flight Paths Team

Weiss, Gail. Refiguring the Ordinary. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN: 2008. 

1. Abstract. Gail Weiss presents her philosophy of the ordinary. To “refigure the ordinary” is to understand the individual’s construction of the commonplace and everyday as a process that is continuous, open-ended and dialogical. By focusing on the several horizons that combine to form any given experience of the ordinary, Weiss proposes an understanding of the ordinary that can be refigured in new and provocative ways. 

    

2. Description.  Weiss draws heavily on works of phenomenological philosophy. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular provide much of her base understanding of structures of consciousness. While Weiss acknowledges the influence of these writers, she makes significant distinctions and modifications in her own work on defining such key terms as context, perspective and horizon. In Part I, Weiss traces the relationship between context and perspective, and shows by what means a “community perspective” becomes established. Critiquing the reductive nature of the “community perspective” requires a disentanglement of context and perspective that posits individual perception as a complex combination of memory, experience, expectation, as well as horizons of race, gender and class. In Part II, Weiss introduces the notion of “co-responsibility” for texts between readers and writers, emphasizing that the human body serves as the ongoing “narrative horizon” through which human beings actively make sense of their lives. Part III traces the progression of habit and habitual experience in order to detail how sexist, racist, and classist mentalities develop into ordinary and everyday realities over time: a process that leaves such damaging ways of engaging difference increasingly difficult to identify and overcome. The work of Pierre Bourdieu on the “habitus” is especially important in this section. To combat this normalizing tendency of culture, Weiss proposes a “politics of the horizon” that gives equal importance to an understanding of the ground that shapes the figure. Part IV focuses on the city as an omnipresent horizon that dominates urban and rural life. Weiss argues that many people’s daily experience is mediated by a compressed and fragmented horizon mediated by the city’s own “urban fabric.” At the same time, the internet facilitates immediate access to expansive imagery of the horizon and information from all around the world. Weiss draws on the work of Elizabeth Grosz who argues that cities “actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants.” Weiss also details different manifestations of violence that rupture the ordinary. Part V explores the challenge of breaking the constraints of the ordinary. Weiss presents death as the “horizon of all horizons” that is at once universally applicable and essentially individuating. Weiss proposes that the dichotomy between absolute alterity of the other and complete knowability of the other is a false one, and that “conventional discourse” can lead to toward authentic experiences of the self in relation to the other and to one’s own death. Through her critique and subsequent “refiguring” of the ordinary, Gail Weiss calls for humans to “develop new interpretive horizons that will allow for greater recognition of, as well as more satisfactory responses to, the conflicting demands generated by the co-existence of various and sometimes incompatible identities both within and across individuals” (202). 

    

3. Commentary.  I think this text is incredibly useful for approaching a critique of vast narratives, networked novels, consumer co-creation, and online communities. From a phenomenological perspective, it is virtually impossible to understand the multitude of individual perspectives that are contributing to these communal works. However, Weiss identifies several factors or horizons that should be taken into account when viewing individual contributions. Weiss’s text can be helpful for identifying both the positive and negative potential of such projects. Weiss’s focus on overlapping horizons should also helpful for identifying nascent and entrenched cyber-horizons.  In terms of “Flight Paths,” Weiss’s work is helpful to begin to identify the numerous perspectives and contexts of individual contributions. Focusing on terms such as memory, expectation, ambiguity, absurdity, and reversibility provides some key sites of investigation. Pullinger and Joseph’s focus on the individual bodies of Yacub and Harriet and the intersection of their hyper-contextualized individual perspectives as a “refiguring of the ordinary” dramatizes many of Weiss’s temporal and spatial concerns. While such a fiction is undeniably compelling, Weiss’s work complicates these overly simplified perspectives.  Repositioning the “Flight Paths Universe” as a phenomenological project facilitates a discussion of whether the site works to promote a progressive diversity of individual reflection or a more problematic “community perspective.” The question of what becomes of the “community perspective” should be a particularly important one for vast narrative projects on the internet. Also we can begin to ask where does co-responsibility lie for vast projects on the internet? While Weiss analyzes communities in the traditional sense of cities and proximal gatherings of people, how might her critique of entrenched horizons of sex, class, and gender be extended to emerging or established cyber communities? 

    

4. Resources for Further Study.  
   •  Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2006.
   • Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London: 1991. 
   • Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1997. 
   • Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2001. 
   • Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Trans. Quentin Lauer. Harper and Row, New York: 1965. 
   • Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London: 1962.
   • Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. Routledge Press, New York: 1999.