The Cultural Logic of the Ordinary: Discourse Re-framing as Micropolitics in Japanese

What does it mean to call something ‘ordinary’, and can ordinariness change over time? Using mixed methodologies from linguistics, anthropology and media studies including pragmatic and discourse analysis of face-to-face interactions and visual analysis of mass and social media, this presentation considers how contemporary Japanese younger adults use futsuu ‘ordinary’ to reframe and reinterpret interactionally salient discourses related to desirable and undesirable life practices—in other words to debate and negotiate the meaning of the good life as an ordinary life. Tracing ‘ordinariness’ as a core cultural logic, or way of organizing social experience, among younger Japanese adults, I show how the ordinary can be variously a marketing slogan, a strategy by which individuals reinterpret the meaning of the ‘good life’, and a site through which anxieties about incipient disasters are debated. I argue that under conditions of neoliberal self-financialization and precarity, a turn to ordinariness can be a site of indirect micropolitical resistance.