Leddy, Thomas. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012, 275 pp., $32.95 paper.

In 1995, Thomas Leddy published in this journal a curious essay on tidiness (“Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities,” Vol. 53, pp. 259–268). Many aestheticians appraised the article at the time as simply the foray of an ordinary language philosopher into new usages. But the essay found other readers, who saw it as a brilliant up close examination of what has come to be known as the aesthetics of everyday life. Leddy's analyses of cleaning and other mundane domestic chores offered a fresh way to look at neglected parts of our aesthetic lives. Now Leddy has delivered The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Thanks to Leddy's efforts, what may have once struck readers as a bit odd is now a veritable subdiscipline in aesthetics, though how much of one remains a hot question for aestheticians. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary is certain to join Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2008) as one of the most reliable introductions to the aesthetics of everyday life. Leddy's now classic essay on tidiness is still here, alongside a brilliant “bestiary,” or compendium, of concepts in everyday aesthetics. “The Bestiary” contains some of the most enjoyable short form aesthetics that I've come across since Roland Barthes was indispensible to a grad student's bookshelf. It is certain to become a useful tool for instructors seeking a manageable entrée into everyday aesthetics for their students. The book has two parts, a discussion of everyday aesthetics as a domain or field within aesthetics and a collection of analyses. The theoretical discussions in the first part of the book take an ambitious position, arguing for the aesthetics of everyday life as a subdiscipline in aesthetics, alongside the aesthetics of art and nature. For Leddy, everyday aesthetics is a “new field.” It has its own object domain, which has suffered neglect from our overemphasis on fine art. From its inception, the argument goes, aesthetics has been concerned mostly with the experience of natural beauty and works of fine art. In so doing, it has missed broad swaths of our aesthetic lives and, consequently, misconstrued or distorted basic concepts in aesthetics. We might say that the error is rooted in the “iceberg fallacy,” whereby the nature of what we can easily see misleads us about what is not readily evident. Consequently, our aesthetic lives are marked by a negative feedback loop whereby mistaken concepts lead us to ignore or de emphasize certain regions of our aesthetic lives, which in turn, causes them to atrophy, further reducing our attention, and so on. For instance, an emphasis on fine art overemphasizes the significance of critical or interpretive activity to our overall aesthetic life. The art that we can easily recognize as art enjoys healthy amounts of critical attention; therefore art criticism must be an important part of our aesthetic lives. This argumentative tack should be familiar to readers of this journal, as it has been deployed in the name of all kinds of cultural practices that are not fine art. Decorative art, folk art, outsider art, children's art, craft, design, mass, industrial, or popular art in its many forms (and I have not yet taken on the global axis) have been wrongly marginalized by one or another hidebound architectonic of the arts that presumably dominates and distorts our culture. Applied to everyday aesthetics, the argument goes something like this: by missing everyday life, aesthetics has missed not just art forms that happen to be part of everyday life but also the distinctive nature of aesthetic experience in everyday life. An examination of the aesthetics of everyday life encourages us to question how we prioritize and evaluate aesthetic objects and practices. I am sympathetic to this argument, although I think that it overstates the cultural influence of the architectonic. Notwithstanding the priorities of critics and museums, everydayness does not strike me as the sort of thing that we can easily marginalize, and to judge by the commercial prominence of gourmet food and home furnishings, it is not clear that everyday aesthetics is marginalized at all. Nevertheless, each critique brings an opportunity to better understand the aesthetic possibilities of different parts of our lives. So, what does everyday aesthetics distinctly add that would compel philosophers to rejigger their aesthetic categories? What is it about everydayness that requires us to rethink aesthetics on its terms? Leddy's definition of everyday aesthetics is extremely broad. He writes that the question of the everyday aesthetics is “determined in part by debates over the definition of art” (p. 22). Instead of everydayness itself, the aesthetics of everyday life is “defined in part by negation, i.e., it is applied to objects that are not art or nature” (pp. 21–22). Taking the via negativa, Leddy names flower arranging and weddings among notable everyday aesthetic practices in his opening pages. Flower arranging and weddings are fascinating practices, meriting all sorts of scholarly attention. This willingness to seize upon unexpected activities and draw out their aesthetic features makes for one of the most valuable contributions of work in everyday aesthetics and one of the strong suits of Leddy's approach. At the same time, the capaciousness of the field presents one of its greatest problems. It is all fine and good to champion the aesthetic features of a widening array of objects and practices. However, if everyday aesthetics is to have meaning and be more than a catchall for what is not discussed elsewhere, it is because everydayness itself matters in some way. In such an exhaustive study, I wished to see more on everyday life itself. Without a sense of the everyday, it is not clear that everyday aesthetics constitutes a new field of aesthetics. The everyday is not a vacuous concept. It is not a mere synonym for the vernacular or ordinary. Far from a catchall, everydayness is fairly restrictive. It pertains to that part of our lives marked by routines or daily patterns. Efforts to enhance the aesthetic character of routines like cooking, dressing, and cleaning are likely to be significantly different from efforts to enhance episodic activity, like vacations or weddings. It is safe to say that, for weddings, we tend to expend a lot of energy on a single day. But, in everyday life, the very art lies is the economy of effort, the easy integration into daily tasks repeated day in, day out. Although they may vary widely, everyday aesthetic activities are structured by the nature of our everyday lives. And it is these core features of everyday life that aestheticians must address in order to characterize the aesthetic dimension of everyday life. The core of everyday life is nearly universal and is composed of no more than a handful of basic activities. Nearly all of us eat and dress every day. And, we dwell someplace, organizing and decorating that place. Finally, we go out into the world on a daily commute or errands. Eating, dressing, dwelling, and commuting are all activities that nearly all of us do nearly every day. One might want to add daydreaming. In any case, when these activities have an aesthetic character, they are properly the subject of the aesthetics of everyday life. For an activity to count as everyday, it should be able to pass the “almost everybody every day” test. “Nearly everybody eats every day” is plausible. But “nearly everyone arranges flowers every day” does not ring true in the contemporary world. “Nearly everybody plans or attends a wedding every day” is not even remotely plausible. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary lacks a firm conception of everyday life. Nevertheless, to read Leddy's substantive analyses of everyday aesthetic qualities is to slowly change how one looks at the world. To answer theoretical questions about aesthetics of everyday life, we have to take a closer look at what is going on in the domain of the everyday. If it is true that the fine art bias weakens our capacity to see and appreciate non fine art activities, then we need powerful methods for getting beyond the bias. With his ordinary language approach, Leddy shows us how we can think about everyday aesthetic life with the closeness once reserved for fine art. His analyses of surface qualities and other features of everyday life reorient perception to help us grasp these practices and provide a valuable model for future work.

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