The Conduct of Sensibility: On what gets noticed and what gets done about it

Timothy O'Leary (University of New South Wales)

Abstract: I want to address a range of everyday phenomena that can be understood as examples of what we might preliminarily call ‘socially mediated attention’. For example, why is it that in the 1960s a televised all-male political discussion panel was unlikely to be seen as problematic, or even in a sense ‘seen’ at all? Why do I feel that if I were to use a plastic shopping bag today, unlike twenty years ago, the bag will be noticed and I will be judged, by myself and others, in a certain way? And what would be the effect, for example, of a future Prime Minister of Australia refusing to stand in front of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags? I will suggest that the concept of ‘the conduct of sensibility’ can provide a useful way of understanding these phenomena as sites in which struggles play out over what I call ‘what gets noticed and what gets done about it’. I will address some of the understandable reservations one might have about using the concept of ‘sensibility’ in a context in which, among other things, a certain amount of precision and rigour is required. I will then give a fuller account of my concept of the ‘conduct of sensibility’, drawing upon Rancière’s idea of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and Foucault’s idea of the ‘conduct of conduct’. Finally, I will attempt to evaluate the extent to which the ‘conduct of sensibility’ can help to guide a critical perspective on the phenomena I have discussed. In other words, is ‘sensibility’ a useful concept for critically engaging with the politically charged process of determining ‘what gets noticed and what gets done about it’?

Bio: Timothy O’Leary is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities & Languages, UNSW. He has worked and studied in Ireland, France, Hong Kong, and Australia. He has published extensively on the work of Michel Foucault, including monographs and edited collections. In recent years, he has published on the potential contribution of works of fiction to practices of critique. His current project is a more expansive investigation of the critical potential of the concept of ‘sensibility’. He is a co-Convenor of the Critique Now research group at UNSW and a co-founding member of the Terra Critica interdisciplinary network based at the University of Utrecht.

Zoom link available on request to Sean Bowden ([email protected])