Paper short abstract:

The rejection-adverse approach taken to offering a hand to a fellow member within a Port Melbourne activity-based group, as with flirting, provided an experience of social order that suggested the potential for politics to be staged.

Paper long abstract:

Across the Port Melbourne activity-based groups in which I participated, much conversation was directed at providing offers of assistance to fellow members. As opportunities for the direct rejection of the offer were foreclosed, it paralleled what may be familiar to Australians as flirting — performing a noncommittal interest in a fun manner that guards against a socially recognised refusal. Such situations demonstrated both the functioning of social order and the imposed, hence contestable, nature of that social order.

Starting with the example of offering to help an older person move some furniture in her house, I contribute to the catalogue of examples of how people make and perceive ethical decisions in a world where order is only ever imposed. My attention to the details of a specific instance offers methodological and conceptual insight into the imposed nature of social identifications as order (whether imposed by us within the situation or to describe it afterwards). Finally, I argue that the seemingly non-confrontational nature and recreational value of these conversations about help, as with flirting, does not render them politically impotent.

I take a distinctive conceptual path by working with Jacques Rancière's presupposition that people have the capacity to be equal, and his definition of politics as being when this equality disrupts and forces a redistribution of the always unequal social order. Yet I speak more broadly to the project of the anthropology of the good (Robbins 2013) and how particular social interactions may reflect, impose and interrupt broader social order.