(THE2a) Theories of the Background I

This session will offer a space for explicit engagement with the ideas, structures, and ways of knowing that often represent the 'background' of everyday life. Many theories have attempted to grasp at this liminal space: lifeworld, habitus, tacit knowledge, prereflective backgrounds, primary frameworks, spheres and counter-spheres, etc. We investigate how questions of such 'theories of the background' apply (and perhaps ought to be adapted) to the current circumstances of our age, whether epistemic, ontological, or ethical. The strength and flexibility of such a session is that all social questions carry buried within them the question of ‘what is going on in the background?’ This includes the causes and maintenance structures for the hate which this year's Congress seeks to challenge. Sociology's inherently interdisciplinary nature represents a strength in this regard and so we welcome presentations representing a host of disciplines to help spark new theoretical engagements to answer the questions of today, tomorrow, and beyond. Tags: Knowledge, Theory

Organizer: Reiss Kruger, York University; Chair: Reiss Kruger, York University; Discussant: Reiss Kruger, York University

Presentations

Jesse Carlson, Acadia University

Climate Change Activism and Theories of the Background

An important strand of social theories of the background emphasize repressed, unconscious, denied, and unprocessed aspects of social life, including collective and individual traumas, prejudices, desires, and emotions. These subterranean phenomena are often linked to societal failures at the level of collective action. In connection to this failures of collective action theme this paper extends a project that critically engages with theories of climate change activism and collective emotions (e.g., Brulle and Norgaard 2019; Malm 2020, 2021; Smith and Howe 2015). These theories work to explain climate change denial and resistance to action as well as studying and theorizing successful and unsuccessful forms of climate activism. Using a comparative approach to different theories of climate change activism and collective emotions, and taking guidance from influential theories of the relationship between social movements and collective emotions (e.g., Butler 2018, 2021, 2022; Cash 2022; Gould 2010; Kaplan 2008; Staiger et al. 2010), this paper argues that successfully responding to the challenges of climate change requires a variety of projects of ‘working through’ repressed, unconscious, denied and unprocessed aspects of social life. After describing and assessing approaches that deploy distinct theories of the background in their theories of climate activism—the suppression of information (Oreskes and Conway 2011), ontological uncertainty and fear avoidance (Giddens 2015), the necessity of social performance (Smith and Howe 2015), a focus on background practices (Shove 2010), theories of interpellation (Malm 2021; Malm et al. 2021)—the paper concludes by arguing that successful climate change activism requires practices that, in addition to presenting relevant scientific information, addressing background anxieties, and changing background practices while foregrounding successful social performances, do not suppress complex and ambiguous individual and collective emotions. While no moment of social life brings everything into the foreground at once, successful climate action must address the full range of repressed, unmourned, and unacknowledged (cf. Zerubavel 2015) aspects of social life, engaging in the work of mourning (Butler 2004), grieving past, present, and future losses (cf. Cunsolo and Ellis 2018) as a necessary step to transformed collective emotions and an ingredient of meaningful collective action.

Matthew Horrigan, Simon Fraser University

Background Figures

Background figures wander blurred by a dirty window, interrupting the beams of lamps that backlight faces leaning into a romantic conversation at a café with a big-lens camera inches away. The camera does not see the wanderers circle and cross the same window again. They follow commands. Break your rhythm. Be less repetitive. Someone comments below a YouTube documentary they call "woke." Look at these people, the commenter argues, and their solidary bandwagoning. They ideate similarly over and over despite changing keywords faster and faster. They resemble background characters in a videogame, "non-player characters," "NPCs" (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023), breaking no scripts, doing no heroics, surely submitting to shadowy orders. A crowd communes at a concert, rippling in time. For some, plans liquidate in the liminoid throes of musics dominating vibe (Henriques, 2010, p. 78). For most, a good time coincides with mutual recognition among neighbours (Reicher, 2002, p. 196). Guards and police fear their surge, but the crowd catches falling members and puts them upright. Someone crowd-surfs in a wheelchair. Motivated by three projects, an archival and ethnographic study of the "service production" industry that makes Hollywood movies in British Columbia, a textual analysis of a Grand Theft Auto V police role-play group that replaces NPCs with human-played "civilians," and an ongoing analysis of how musics license subcultures, I develop a theory of background people—backgrounders. Most people, most times, register to others indistinctly: traffic, sometimes conference applicants, sometimes former students with forgotten names. Blurrily we make each other’s ordinary atmospheres (Anderson, 2009; Stewart, 2011, p. 452). But stigma attends playing background. (Dis)figured as lumpenproletariats—too deprived of agency to become agentic—crowds framed as stupid have given a point of agreement to Marx (Barrow, 2020, pp. 22–23), some of his readers (Kamola, 2021), and their conservative recuperators (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023). In videogames, NPCs remediate cinematic backgrounders, human bodies removed to leave patientic entities that red-pilled writers memeify as icons of adversaries. Against a majority, deriding backgrounders has become an argumentum ab populum . For cinema, a tantalizingly sparse literature considers backgrounders (e.g., Didi-Huberman, 2009; Fortmueller, 2021; Lauwaert, 1987/2023), usually not on their own terms but as the "extras" that assistant directors "wrangle" and "set" (like non-human animals and furniture). The term "backgrounder" comes from the West Coast Backgrounders Union, a short-lived group that tried to advocate for "cash extras" from 1999 to 2003. Defeated and absorbed by the actors guild (see BC Labour Relations Board Case 46166, 2003), the backgrounders union achieved little more than to give backgrounders an emic name. But in theory, that is something. I theorize backgrounders aggregations as momentary or fixed. Cinemas flatten crowds, allowing the face of one actor to tower over many, reducing a groups ambience to something balanced lightly against an individual charismatic. So different from what crowds do live—they desolidify and resolidify, pour themselves into flexible solidarities with a flowing tentacularity (Haraway, 2016), yet more flexible than limbs and skin. Gathering and parting, less brute forcing than dividual, to become suddenly bigger and smaller, to acquire and jettison new organs, is a crowds transhuman capacity, its agency to morph. As a robot is a crowd of components, so backgrounders compose cyborg bodies. Common among milieus that degrade backgrounders is a fixity of difference between backgrounder and foregrounder. Directors avoid "upgrading" extras. NPCs rarely become human-played. But like Keith Johnstone theorizes friendship as flexibility of relative social status (Johnstone, 1979/1987, p. 37), I consider backgrounders mutable backgrounding, their potential to come forward momentarily. A background not only gives a place of safe retreat, but now seems a repository of measurable history for scientists who consider the complexity of a reproduced thing in terms of the group of other objects that evolved with it (Sharma et al., 2023). Perhaps an adequate theory of backgrounders must be a "dedramatize[d] theory" (Stewart, 2011, p. 445), whose subjects effect momentarily rather than persist as moral heroes. Suspended between a heuristic that foregrounds one actant stretching tendrils in a network, and a heuristic that feels many as an atmosphere, I consider how to value a backgrounder not as "upgraded" to the fore but as a part-distinct part of an affecting crowd.

Mark Gilks, Independent

Backgrounds of War: A phenomenology of official British war art in Afghanistan

For the British soldier during the recent conflict in Afghanistan, “Afghan” did not refer to the geographic area of Central Asia or to the political entity that other political entities may or may not recognise as an autonomous “Afghanistan”. It referred, rather, to a “theatre of operations” (to use military jargon), to a collectively imagined space in which the military (and broader society) can collectivity realise its ends of being at war. How do we delineate, conceptualise, and understand this imagined space? And what, moreover, is its ethical and political significance? In this paper, I attempt to answer these questions by critically interpreting “official British war art” – a category of art which, in the contemporary British context, has been dominated by impressionist painting commissioned directly by military regiments or by the Imperial War Museum. I analyse this painting to explore what it can teach us about the collectively imagined (and militarised) space of “Afghan”. To do so, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics. Merleau-Ponty facilitates an understanding of the (impressionist) painting not as an embellishment of the “real world”, but as—potentially (if it is a good painting)—disclosing the “enigma of vision”, of teaching us what we really see when we look at the world. Merleau-Ponty cannot, however, facilitate a bridging of the gap between the artist and soldier, and for this I turn to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Drawing on Gadamer’s critique of genius and his notion of a “hermeneutic universe”, I develop an understanding of the official war artists as an ethnographer who, to some degree, belongs to the same lifeworld as the soldier he (sometimes she) is commissioned to paint. What the official war artist/impressionists painter discloses, therefore, is not an objective and universal “enigma of vision”, but a parochial and culturally contingent one. I argue that bringing Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception together in this way highlights the unique sociological validity of the official impressionist war painting: the painting, as such, bears the potential to teach us what it is like to be a British soldier by depicting the contours of the World in which and for which the soldier exists. Thus, the painting is not an abstracted corruption of “reality” which would ideally be replaced by the photograph or by video footage; it is, rather, an ethnographic exposition of a lifeworld, capable of offering unique insights into experience and behaviour. Moreover, the prejudice of the painter is not something to be methodologically overcome but is to be exploited. Indeed, it is precisely this prejudice which constitutes the validity of the artwork – for it is a prejudice which represents, to some degree, the prejudice of the subject to be understood. The paper develops in three mains stages. In the first part, I develop the aforementioned theoretical framework. In the second section, I then explore the spatial horizons of the world – of how the world, as World (in a phenomenological-existentialist sense), is always bounded by horizons which define and delineate it spatially. I explore, for example, the significance of romanticised landscapes, of sublime mountains, and of the “fog of war” which mystifies and—for the soldier—validates the “theatre of war”. Lastly, I explore the historical horizons of the soldier’s world. Comparing contemporary impressionist depictions with British imperial depictions from the nineteenth century, I show that the soldier/artist’s imaginative projection of the World is often steeped in traditional frames of war, and that the World therefore betrays a deep historical continuity. I conclude with reflections on the moral and political significance of the collectively imagined World of “Afghan”. In particular, I explore how it enables sentiments of enmity, of tragic indifference, and of hatred – and ultimately, how it enables acts of violence. Overall, my aim is to problematize the soldier’s World, to reveal its existential contingency, and to facilitate a critique of bellicose horizons.