Workshop outline
Description
This workshop continues an on-going examination of the cultural dimensions of civil order. ‘Civil order’ refers to a distinctively modern conception of social order in which orderliness is guaranteed not only through ‘civic’ institutions (police, courts, legislatures, etc.) but also through ideas and practices of ‘civility’ and ‘civilisation’. A theory of ‘civil order’ contends that state power is legitimate insofar as it promotes and secures a form of order that is peaceful and civil (Elias, 1994), keeps disruptive impulses in check (Freud 1930; Marcuse 1955), instils in its subjects respect for private property and individual freedoms (Taylor, 2003), and expresses itself in the manners, comportment and norms of conduct practiced by ‘civil’ or ‘civilised’ subjects (Farmer 2016, Thomas 2018).
Civil order, therefore, foregrounds a continuity between the macro-scale distribution of competencies within the state apparatus, and the micro-scale organisation of embodied habits, instincts, affects and dispositions. Civil order produces an idealised image of a ‘well-ordered’ and ‘civilised’ society that is inhabited by individuals with equally well-ordered and civilised minds and bodies. Clearly, this obscures a complex, fluid and fragmented reality, which is replete with substantial inequalities, structural violence, political conflict, and psychological repression. Moreover, it erects symbolic and material boundaries between those who abide by the established norms of civility and those whose conduct is marked as ‘uncivil’, vulgar, anti-social, or alien, thereby reinforcing existing exclusions. Civil order thus occludes significant tensions and hierarchies within and between societies and individuals.
Our focus in this workshop will be on such processes of appearance and occlusion, with particular attention to the various ways in which civil order relies on the organisation of the senses. We are interested in how civic institutions appear through images, representations, in architectural form, or in symbols, rituals, myths and narratives; how the nature of a class-bound order and other forms of domination are dissimulated or obscured through practices that appeal to civility, civilisation and civil order; and how the deliberate (and incidental) generation of affects, atmospheres, emotional states and patterns of perception shapes civic life. Our contention is that multiple senses of civil order can be discerned through an attention to the ways in which modern state power relies on the organisation of the domain of the sensible.
Format
The workshop will facilitate conversations around this broad set of concerns. Instead of prompting participants to present more or less developed papers, we ask our contributors to participate in roundtable discussions that relate to one of the three main themes outlined below. Each speaker will have the opportunity to deliver a brief initial intervention, no longer than 10 minutes, before engaging in an extended conversation around a common set of questions and concerns with their fellow panel-members.
Contributors have been invited based on the relevance and value of their work for these discussions, so they are encouraged to draw on their previous scholarship for their interventions, but this should be geared towards developing an interchange between positions and perspectives. Each panel will be moderated by a chair (one of the three organisers) whose main task is to maintain the flow and the focus of the conversation. Ahead of the workshop, the chair of each panel will work with panel-members to devise a set of questions and/or prompts, drawing on the panel’s collective work, that will help structure the discussion.
We hope this format will produce a collaborative and generative set of conversations around the ‘senses of civil order’, which allows for new ideas about these topics to emerge whilst drawing on individuals’ existing research.
Themes
The workshop will address three main themes. We hope these will act as springboards rather than boundaries to the conversation. Overlaps between the themes are welcome. As mentioned above, the panellists will agree on an extended set of questions ahead of the workshop. Here, we collect some potential questions or problems that each panel may choose to explore.
Technologies of Civil Order
What are the techniques, apparatuses and modalities through which civil order is performed, constructed, policed and reproduced? How do they relate to the technological domains that structure our daily lives (e.g., transportation, tele-communication, workplace, entertainment)?
How are these technologies implemented, formed, practiced? How do they differ across time and space?
How do these technologies affect experience, identities, belonging? What are they meant to do, and how does this contrast with what they actually do?
Encounters with Civil Order
What are the ways in which civil order is encountered, felt, sensed, lived?
How do we understand the different forms such encounters take: from the institutional to the personal, from overt coercion to subtle modes of control and/or differentiation, over to the spontaneous?
How does civil order shape and condition, or is shaped and conditioned by, people’s consciousness, subjectivity and emotions?
Representations of Civil Order
How is civil order represented in the spheres of politics, ethics, aesthetics and culture?
What are the promises and limits of civil order as an emancipatory idea or project?
To what extent might aesthetic or cultural representations of civil order continue to forms of resistance?