This project, developed by Aberdeen’s Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and the Rule of Law (CISRUL), examines the threat of fascism within rather than against democracy. This ideological turn was examined by scholars of the Frankfurt School of Social Research and other intellectual refugees from classical fascism, particularly Norbert Elias (1897-1990) author of the classic work of historical sociology The Civilizing Process, first published in 1939. Elias’s works chart the reversible externalisation of violence. Building on Elias’s critique of ‘reality-blind institutions’, and informed by his proposals for empowering structured controversy and open deliberation, the project aims to stress-test the concept of public-centred curatorship.
As part of the pilot research a citizens’ jury was randomly assembled, from members of the general public in Newcastle, to commission a public-interest arts project. The jury selected the theme of Gaming. The jurors drafted an open call for a creative project that compares power, domination and the glorification of violence in the invented worlds of gaming with everyday life and reality. Are malevolent invented worlds a consequence of a lack of control and collective material investment in the physical world we inhabit? How far do the invented realities of gaming actually underpin social isolation and ecological catastrophe?
This jury-led commissioning process will provide data for a collaborative ethnography to be carried out with four more randomised commissioning juries and twelve control groups to test capacities for deliberation about complex and controversial issues. The outcomes will be at the centre of a multi-media multi-site exhibition entitled Domination, Courtship and Belonging: The Spirit of Fascism in the Arts