In and Out of Order and Control
Place your order and take control. In 2019-2020, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture conducted their collective research on two keywords of contemporary cultural studies, order and control.
Control presupposes order, needing arrangements to exert power, so our first half takes up “order.” “Order and Disorder in the Cosmos” examines these arrangements in their moments of making, explores questions of scale in thinking about order, and unpacks the mechanisms of order and what they attempt to abate: disorder, random chance, chaos. We move from the order of the cosmos to logic of the racial order, from the order of life and death to the ordering of the future. If order once referred to the shape and hierarchy of cosmological and theological systems, to religious orders and rites of ordination, order was gradually secularized as it began to map and taxonomize our natural and social world. Taken together, we ask if social life requires order to exist, and what kinds of disorderly possibilities still persist on the fringes of ordered life?
Orders require controls, forms of regulation to maintain power, security, and predictability, so our second half turns to “control.” “Controlling Subjects” takes a deep dive into issues of agency and its limits with the word “control.” Control is a keyword that lets us interrogate questions of power, security, and regulation. Today, everything – including ourselves – feels a little out of control. How do we reassert control over our own lives, even as we resist it from above? Control seeks security, regularity, and predictability. From gun control, birth control, border control, traffic control, flood control, rent control, price control, to remote control, it is a word that cuts many ways. It names the desire to regulate apparently natural flows and fluctuations, often through the development of automatic feedback control systems or machine-learning algorithms, which might clash with our efforts at self-control, keeping our minds, emotions, and bodies from getting out of control. This year the Working Group asks: who or what is in or out of control?