Why praise Astaire? 

Michael Wood

The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it. If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way words or names become strange if we keep staring at them. The very notion turns into a baffling riddle. Shall we say that the ordinary doesn’t exist, or that it exists only when we don’t look at it closely? Stanley Cavell has been thinking about the ordinary (although not only about that) for the whole of his philosophical career, and he knows the riddle inside out. But the riddle is not where his interest lies. He doesn’t mind if the world goes strange on us, as long as we keep looking at it, and he is happy to assert ‘the extraordinariness of what we accept as the ordinary’. The question for him is not a linguistic one, and beyond the simple, slippery word is a whole range of human practices crying out for, but not often getting, our attention.

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