On power, habitus, and (in)civility: Foucault meets Elias meets Bauman in the playground

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Elias, and Bauman, this article examines how the playground has articulated specific configurations of power/knowledge. Originally designed to cultivate virtue and counteract vice, the playgrounds of the past were to complete the discipline of the schoolroom, assisting the trained master to ‘direct’ the child’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. From its tentative beginnings in the work of Rousseau, the strategy of supervised play was intended to conceal its purpose from the child, with power exercised through discreet forms of surveillance and constraint that would, it was hoped, gradually be embodied and re-enacted as self-restraint. Contemporary playgrounds - and here the article focuses on Ireland - no longer claim to be directing the conduct of children. Public playgrounds are framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while commercial playgrounds provide a service to consumers of play. Yet, both unobtrusively act upon the child’s capacity for action, and there is a tension between these different modes of provision. Setting recent Eliasian scholarship on ‘de-civilising’ processes against Bauman’s theory of ‘liquid modernity’, and utilising Foucault’s notion of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’, the article examines this tension and shows how it provides insight into the relationship between power, habitus, and (in)civility today.