CFP: Repeat! The Logics of Exercises, Trainings, Tests and Rehearsals

The Department of Sociology and the Centre for the Study of Invention and
Social Process
Goldsmiths, University of London
5-7 November 2014

Confirmed keynote speakers: Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University) and
Trevor Pinch (Cornell University)

Organised by Michael Guggenheim, Joe Deville and Zuzana Hrdlickova
Funded by the ERC starting grant project: Organizing Disaster. Civil
Protection and the Population

Exercises, tests and forms of training occur in many different places.
Sporting and musical activity consists largely in training, with the actual
competition or performance only being short-lived. In disaster and
emergency preparedness, exercises are often one of the main ways to act,
since actual catastrophic events are scarce and hugely complex. Our
societies are based on the belief that without testing, bridges would fail,
that without rehearsals plays and conference talks would be incoherent, and
that without training, football and chess games would rarely feature any
clever tactical moves and in disasters there would be no organisational
infrastructure in place to help people. And whole professions have emerged
whose task it is to create such exercises and forms of testing.

In this conference we are particularly interested in how these activities
use particular knowledges, routines and objects to re-create their absent
objects. What all these practices share is the absence of some of the main
elements of the phenomenon they are dealing with. Different than the often
discussed computer simulation, exercises, practices and tests do not
replace the world with a world pared down to computer data. Rather, they
recreate it in highly elaborate ways, inventing various objects,
technologies and social forms. These range from ball throwing machines, to
test apparatuses, to highly specific communities of practice, and even to
building entire cities for the purpose of an exercise. Their goal is not to
bring the whole world down to one flat digital level, but rather to render
a small piece of it actual through various social and material means. The
goal here is not realism, but making parts of the world amenable to repeat
practice.

One way much of approaching such renderings of the world within social
science and social theory has been to see them as involved in forms of
performance or enactment. Following the ethnomethodology of Garfinkel,
Goffman’s frame analysis and Turner’s ritual theory, a new wave of social
theory has looked with fresh eyes at the enactment of the social and how it
may be socially and materially achieved. Many of these ideas conceive of
the performative as an ongoing accomplishment. But such a conception often
tends to miss a crucial element of the performative: the time-based
relationship between preparation and performance. In this conference, we
would like to explore this temporal relationship and the social and
material effects to which it gives rise, by focusing on the similarities
and differences between the full range of social practices that depend on
preparation. Rather than extending theories of theatre to the whole of
society, therefore, we ask how a certain element of theatre -- the
rehearsal --  exists in other social domains, including those of testing,
training and the exercise.

Some questions we would like to consider:

- What are the logics of these tests and rehearsals? Can these be observed
across different fields?
- What are the underlying routines, knowledges and technologies?
- What objects and practices are used to create the absent target of the
exercise?
- Can we observe their transfer between fields?
- How is the future reality created in the present of the exercise?
- What differentiates the rehearsal from the actual performance? How do
actors try to account for this difference?
- Is there a proliferation of practices of rehearsal and testing, and if
so, why?
- Are there counter-movements of de-rehearsing the world? (Such as
improvisation in music and theatre, but in other fields?)

We encourage participants to address any relevant field, including the role
of rehearsal in theatre, music, and film, training in sports, management,
in professional domains, the military and in human-animal relations and
testing in engineering, medicine etc.

Please submit an abstract of ca. 500 words by July 20th to
[log in to unmask]

In case you do not have funding for travel and/or accommodation, the
conference organisers may be able to cover it. Please indicate whether you
need either or both travel and accommodation when you submit your abstract.

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