Paul O'Connor | United Arab Emirates University (original) (raw)

Books by Paul O'Connor

Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimeticism, 2023

The Covid-19 pandemic exemplifies an emergent form of hegemony in late modern societies, a techno... more The Covid-19 pandemic exemplifies an emergent form of hegemony in late modern societies, a technocratic managerialism in which the interlocking elites who populate government and corporate bureaucracies, big tech, large media organisations, and academia define the ‘social good’ and construct a consensus for the implementation of the policies they view as necessary to achieve it. Policy measures are increasingly legitimised by ‘expert opinion’ rather than as expressions of the ‘popular will’. The chapter attempts to understand the phenomenon of ‘expertise’ using the concept of ‘trickster logic’. Central to trickster logic are processes of substitution, mediation, and translation. ‘Experts’ are typically individuals who have mastered abstract idioms into which they translate elements of social experience. In the process, they generate conceptual and normative constructs which react back on the social world, enabling experts – or more accurately, the policymakers and managerial bureaucracies which employ them – to influence conduct and behaviour. The result is an ‘inversion of reality’, in which abstract constructs take precedence over people’s concrete life-circumstances and individual judgement and legitimise a fine-grained regulation of the conduct of individuals. There is an elective affinity of expertise with three other fundamental aspects of contemporary society: the digitalisation and datafication of social life; the growth of managerialism and bureaucracy; and the expanding influence and numbers of the professional-managerial class. In combination, these influences give rise to a managed society in which an ever-expanding area of human life is subjected to surveillance, regulation, and administrative control.

'Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena' in The Technologisation of the Social (eds. Paul O'Connor & Marius Benta), London & New York: Routledge, 2022

Not long before Covid-19 upended the world, my wife and I went for a meal at our favourite Indian... more Not long before Covid-19 upended the world, my wife and I went for a meal at our favourite Indian restaurant. Like many establishments in the United Arab Emirates, it offers curtained-off booths where families can dine in privacy. After a pleasant meal, I asked for the bill, and the waiter suggested we review the restaurant on TripAdvisor or Zomato. We agreed, and he asked if we would mind doing so there and then, requesting that we mention him by name. The waiter hovered over us as my wife took out her phone and wrote a quick review. This incident started me thinking about the pressures generated by our ubiquitous visibility as citizens of a digitalised world. The restaurant evidently felt a need to generate online reviews, since this is now a principal means of attracting customers. This pressure was transmitted to the staff and used as a disciplinary tool-being praised in reviews would demonstrate staff were providing quality service. The staff, in turn, transferred it to customers. It was as though, after the quiet intimacy of our meal in the curtained booth, the walls suddenly turned to glass, and we found ourselves blinking amid the perpetual florescent visibility of the virtual world. From our perspective, the incident at the restaurant was a relatively trivial one; from that of the staff, less so, as a cumulative failure to garner positive reviews might threaten their jobs. In either case, it is a symptom of something larger, a trend in contemporary life I have termed 'coercive visibility'. Coercive visibility is a process by which an ever-greater portion of our lives is made transparent to the critical judgement of non-intimates, in ways which are increasingly institutionalised, often quantified and operate to mould conduct and identity. It is expanding in importance as digital technology makes us visible to a growing array of individuals, organisations and institutions, often in ways which encode asymmetric relations of power. This visibility is 'coercive', firstly because insertion into the public-or quasi-public gaze is frequently not a matter of choice, and secondly because the process moulds us to comply with the disciplinary requirements of late modern society. Bernard Harcourt (2015: 15) writes that our digitalised lives render us 'legible to others, open, accessible, subject to everyone's idiosyncratic projects-whether governmental, commercial, personal, or intimate'. Harcourt draws a line between Coercive visibility

Home: The Foundations of Belonging, 2019

Questions of home and belonging have never been more topical. Populist politicians in both Europe... more Questions of home and belonging have never been more topical. Populist politicians in both Europe and America play on anxieties over globalisation by promising to reconstitute the national home, through cutting immigration and 'taking back control'. Increasing numbers of young people are unable to afford homeownership, a trend with implications for the future shape of families and communities. The dominant conceptualisations of home in the twentieth century-the nation-state and the suburban nuclear household-are in crisis, yet they continue to shape our personal and political aspirations. Home: The Foundations of Belonging puts these issues into context by drawing on a range of disciplines to offer a deep anthropological and historical perspective on home. Beginning with a vision of modernity as characterised by both spiralling liminality and an ongoing quest for belonging, it plumbs the archaic roots of Western civilisation and assembles a wide body of comparative anthropological evidence to illuminate the foundations of a sense of home. Home is theorised as a stable centre around which we organise both everyday routines and perspectives on reality, bringing order to a chaotic world and overcoming liminality. Constituted by a set of ongoing processes which concentrate and embody meaning in intimate relationships, everyday rituals and familiar places, a shared home becomes the foundation for community and society. The Foundations of Belonging thus elevates 'home' to the position of a foundational sociological and anthropological concept at a moment when the crisis of globalisation has opened the way to a revaluation of the local.

Papers by Paul O'Connor

International Political Anthropology, 2021

Responding to Julien Freund’s piece in the previous issue of International Political Anthropology... more Responding to Julien Freund’s piece in the previous issue of International Political Anthropology, this paper asks: Can decadence be a legitimate concept in the analysis of societies? If so, how do we conceptualise it? While Freund talks of European civilisation as decadent, I will focus on the decay of elites, something which can occur repeatedly in the history of individual civilisations. An elite can be considered decadent when it no longer possesses qualities which enable it to act cohesively in
response to challenges and secure the allegiance or acceptance of those outside it. Elite decay is largely a function of social complexity: as complexity advances, the circumstances of managing and
profiting from it tend to produce among members of the elite characteristics such as nihilistic individualism, cultural amnesia and over-sophistication, risk aversion, rigidity and entitlement, which render them increasingly incapable of providing leadership. In this case the elite will either be replaced en masse by members of a different social group – from lower down in the social scale, or outside the society altogether – or the society will ‘collapse’, that is, revert to a less-complex, more localised mode of existence.

International Political Anthropology, 2015

Collective memory, as an imaginative terrain which interweaves the past with the present and unde... more Collective memory, as an imaginative terrain which interweaves the past with the present and underpins the identity and ethos of a social group, is inseparable from place. As globalization and electronic communications have weakened our connection to place, collective memory has been
eroded. The result is a historical amnesia which undermines our ability to imagine alternatives to the present and articulate a shared set of intrinsic, as opposed to purely instrumental, values. Such historical amnesia increasingly characterizes Ireland as the country enters a decade of
centenaries of the events which led to the establishment of the Irish state. In this context, reconnecting with the collective memory embedded in place has the potential to be a source of cultural and social renewal.

Memory Studies, 2022

All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experienc... more All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experience and provide a coherent foundation for individual and collective identities. However, different modes of collective memory have different meaning-making potentials. In this article, I will assess three modes of remembering, namely folk, commemorative and mediatised memory, from the perspective of how they generate integrative meaning. Each of these modes of remembrance will be examined through the prism of a case study examining the nature of the memories associated with a specific lieux de memoire. I will suggest that over time, memory becomes progressively ‘unanchored’ from localised contexts due to its increasing technological and institutional mediation and that this has important implications for the depth and kind of meaning it provides.

Memory Studies, 2023

Memory invariably involves sifting and sorting historical traces and reassembling them into socie... more Memory invariably involves sifting and sorting historical traces and reassembling them into societal representations of the past. Usually this has been done by social groups of different kinds or the cultural institutions associated with them, and has provided materials for the construction and maintenance of group identity. In what I term “spectacular memory,” however, the sifting and sorting of memory traces is performed by commercial and media institutions within a globalized cultural framework to create spectacles for mass consumption. Spectacular memory is enabled by the progressive breakdown of Halbwach’s “social frameworks of memory”—the association of memory with face-to-face relations within social groups. In late modern societies, “memory” as a coherent body of representations which is the property of more-or-less bounded social groups has largely devolved into a globalized store of representations curated and diffused through the media, advertising, tourism and entertainment industries. This article uses the example of the history-themed shopping malls of Dubai to characterize this form of memory.

Mobilities, 2021

The United Arab Emirates has experienced massive social change within a relatively short period ... more The United Arab Emirates has experienced massive social change within
a relatively short period of time since the commercial exploitation of oil
began in the 1960s. This has been accompanied by large-scale inward
migration, with non-nationals comprising 88.5% of the population and an
even higher proportion of the workforce. The attainment of citizenship is
extremely difficult and non-citizens’ residence in the country is conditional on their employment, resulting in a high turnover of population.
This makes the UAE a fascinating case study of ‘homing’ in the context of
a world where mobility, rather than settlement, is increasingly the norm.
This article is based on a large-scale, mixed-methods study of homing
among both Emirati nationals and resident professionals undertaken from
2018 to 2020. It conceptualises their differential strategies of homemaking along a scale from ‘centred’ to ‘distributed’ experiences of home and deploys the theoretical lens of liminality to explore the implications of ‘dwelling-in-mobility’.

International Political Anthropology, 2020

Weber's analysis of the Protestant ethic is vital to understanding not just the origins of the mo... more Weber's analysis of the Protestant ethic is vital to understanding not just the origins of the modern world, but contemporary values and behaviour. Despite what we might assume, our society remains pervaded by what Weber characterised as 'inner-worldly asceticism'. A severe constraint on emotions, impulses, and appetites, and the ethical rationalisation of conduct, are integral to contemporary processes of subjectification and continue to guide everyday behaviour. This can be demonstrated through analysis of a range of contemporary discourses, including those around work, anti-racism, and responses to Covid-19, which underline the continued role of rational asceticism in the life-conduct and subjectification of the 21 stcentury global middle class. Supplementing the perspective of Weber with that of Elias, it will be argued that rational asceticism today functions to facilitate integration in a globalised technological society. It complements, at the level of individual subjectification, the broader processes of ever-deepening rationalisation and penetration of the life-world by the global market, bureaucratic administration and the public sphere.

Irish Journal of Anthropology, 2020

This article uses the Etruscan rite, an ancient ritual associated with the foundations of Roman ... more This article uses the Etruscan rite, an ancient ritual associated with the
foundations of Roman colonies, as a prism through which to study the
way in which a collective home is created. This involves a process of
cosmicization, orchestrating the elements of our experience into a
meaningful unity. Parallels are drawn between the Roman foundation
ritual and similar practices and beliefs from cultures around the world.
Underlying them all, it is argued, are a set of fundamental principles for
organizing experiences which have appeared in almost every settled
agrarian society. These include a microcosmic organization of space, the
organization of time in terms of ‘primordial depth’ (Casey 1993), the
ritual establishment of ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins 2011), and the
inscription of symbolic boundaries. Finally, it is suggested that while
these ways of organizing experience have all but disappeared in the
contemporary household, they persist as part of the affective
underpinning of nationalism and help explain its contemporary
resurgence.

International Political Anthropology, 2022

The article explores the cultural significance of the haunted house formula in contemporary ficti... more The article explores the cultural significance of the haunted house formula in contemporary fiction and film. These narratives involve the fictive staging of a reversion to modes of thought and feeling which are integral to the experience of meaning, but repressed within core institutional arenas of the modern world. Latour, Lévy-Bruhl, Habermas and Bacon are drawn on to theorise the peculiarly modern severance between knowledge and meaning which these narratives transgress. Through a deliberate invocation of liminality, the haunted house formula enacts a kind of transcendence in which the modern 'self in a case' (Elias, 1978) is dissolved and individuals are restored to a condition of participation in their surroundings characteristic of older patterns of belief. Such participatory and existential modes of experience-simultaneously fascinating and terrifyingare particularly associated with the private sphere of the home, which has served as a refuge from rationalisation in modern societies; hence the centrality of domestic space in the haunted house formula.

International Political Anthropology, 2014

The stars have played an important role throughout human history in literature, art, mythology, s... more The stars have played an important role throughout human history in literature, art, mythology, science, navigation and religion. However due to light pollution most people in industrialised societies rarely, if ever, get to experience the night sky in its full splendour. This is one instance of a larger process by which social life has become progressively severed from the natural processes and human biological cycles that had previously framed it. Globalised late modernity is characterised by the denial of any reality outside the realm of human control defined by technology and the market. This has the effect of undermining our capacity to find a stable meaning in our experience and shape coherent collective narratives.