Abstract
This introduction begins with Hortense J. Spillers’s return to the ordinary in her essay “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” first delivered as an address at the 1982 Barnard Center Conference on Sexuality. For Spillers, recovering the vernacular language and everyday experiences of Black women unsettles the exclusions of mainstream feminist theory, yet attending to ordinary grammar means not relinquishing theoretical critique but recognizing the ordinary as itself a domain of injustice and obfuscation. By starting with Spillers, rather than Ludwig Wittgenstein, this introduction questions who counts as a theorist of “ordinary language.” It then shows how Wittgenstein’s own return to the ordinary displays an ambivalence similar to that of Spillers. For Wittgenstein, many seemingly philosophical problems are undone by noticing language as it is ordinarily used, yet the ordinary poses new problems as much as it dissolves old ones. Summarizing the disciplinarily diverse contributions to this special issue and surveying a surge of recent scholarship on the ordinary, this introduction proposes the orthogonal term ordinariness to capture the plural and diffuse way that language, people, or social, economic, and political conditions might be ordinary.
