(THE2b) Theories of the Background II

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

Saeed Hydaralli, Roger Williams University

DEI and the Challenge of Sustaining Shared Futures

This paper directly engages the conference theme of “challenging hate: sustaining share futures” via an analysis of conflict surrounding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as a practice. DEI initiatives, according to its advocates, might be said to precisely challenge the ‘hateful’ practices--in the form of discrimination, bias, and the like--that have long negatively affected the life chances of minoritized members, whether in relation to employment, admission to educational institutions, places of residence, private clubs, places of worship, sports and recreation and more. By virtue of its commitment to greater diversity and the principles of equity and inclusion, DEI is believed by its advocates to make for communities that concern themselves with the well-being of all members, and in this way facilitate a shared future. On the other hand, those opposed to DEI initiatives argue that its practices, rather than combatting ‘hate’ and facilitating shared futures, is in fact ‘hateful’, divisive and damaging to the well-being of organizations and communities, and thus the antithesis of what it purports to be. For instance, opponents contend that DEI is a trojan horse for affirmative action, and thereby engages in what it calls reverse discrimination whereby members from historically advantaged groups are now themselves victims of discrimination. Essentially, opponents of DEI contend that fairness, as it relates to merit and qualification, are sacrificed at the altar of diversity and equity. In other words, this view proposes that the most qualified candidates are being overlooked, replaced, in order to make a place for those whose most prominent qualification is not their achievements or skills, but rather their social identity as members of historically disadvantaged groups. A most prominent example of this belief relates to the former, and recently resigned, president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay. On the heels of Ms. Gay’s resignation over her purportedly inadequate handling of student protests having to do with the most recent Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, and accusations that she has engaged in plagiarism, it has also been argued by her most fervent critics that she was a DEI hire who did not possess the qualifications that are supposed to be commensurate with the office of president of Harvard University. It is that alleged absence of qualification that is cited by her critics as accounting for her supposed mishandling of the student protests. In other words, she was in over her head, and DEI is the culprit. Rather than prosecute an argument as to the benefit or harm of DEI to the lives of members and communities, this paper is directed to identifying and developing the problem, in the form of a discourse, that animates this conflict over DEI. It is that unspoken (background) problem that grounds the conflict, and must therefore be formulated in order to make the conflict over, and the practice of, DEI intelligible. And in this way provide the rudiments of a shared future in the form of sustained dialogue over that unspoken problem.

Steve Bailey, York University

Overcoming Semio-Phobia/Semio-Philia: George Bataille's "General Economy" and the Symbolic Order as Background

Though perhaps less evident in the Anglo-North American context, the theorization of a “symbolic order” (Lacan) as constitutive of the grounds of subject-formation and cultural meaning making has been crucial in attempts for formulate a “background” for social practice within the Continental Social Theoretical tradition, present in a diverse array of thinkers from Georges Bataille and Alfred Schutz in the early-mid 20th century to more recent work by Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, and Hans-Herbert Koegler. Today, though, there is a notable tendency for synoptic social theoretical work, work aimed an uncovering a fundamental grounding for socio-cultural practice, to lapse into two poles in regard to issues of meaning-making. The first, what I describe as “semio-phobic” tends to screen out questions of meaning as innately subordinate to material, technological, or even biological/neurological factors. The second, the “semio-philic,” accords weight to issues of meaning but fails to take proper account of the instabilities of any system of signification and lapses into a proto-behaviorist formulation of meaning; in the realm of pedagogy, this is evident in discussions of “trigger warnings” and other attempts of contain meaning. In this paper, I consider the work of author and anthropologist Georges Bataille and particularly his formulation of a “general economy”, one that exceeds the boundaries of “restrictive economies” and focuses on the interplay of material, semiotic, and ritual practices. Bataille had a profound impact on the thought of philosopher-sociologist Jean Baudrillard and anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in building models—“symbolic exchange” and “cultural reason,” respectively—for a kind of background for social action and conceptualizing the whirl of symbols, material objects, and human affect. The possibility for a kind of holism here (of the sort that Badiou locates in the Deleuzian tradition) is immediately undermined by the multiply de-stabilizing presence of sliding signifiers, liquid modernity, and the vertiginous speed of socio-technical change (see Virilio, esp.). In this sense Bataille’s work refines the subsequent Lacanian paradigm of the “symbolic order” as much as it anticipates it, and allows for an accounting of the vicissitudes of cultural meaning without a necessary reduction to social constructivist idealism. The value of this rethinking of the “general economy” and “the background” is the dual movement of opening up a wider sense of what might constitute a “last instance” (Althusser) grounding for a social totality beyond brute materialism while building a theoretical apparatus for exploring the interplay of material, semiotic, and potentially cognitive/neurological factors. The second is particularly important as it suggests the possibility for greater integration of research from a wide range of often-marginalized approaches within social theory without a full acceptance of the conceptual foundations of the same. As an example, affect theory and symbolic interactionism are grounded in, respectively, a biocultural emphasis on pre-cognition and, for the second, a view of meaning-making as existentially innate, and both face opposition for “astructural bias” and sometimes a kind of methodological individualism. I’ve argued elsewhere that symbolic interaction could be productively placed in dialogue with the neo-Bataille tradition in French thought (2017) and in this presentation I expand this to a wider possibilities of reformulating “the background” as a general economic space of meaning and self-formation. With particular reference to the conference theme, hate is perhaps ideally suited to consideration along such lines, given its frequent rooting in socio-economic and more broadly material circumstances and yet necessarily holding both a pre-cognitive affective intensity and an individuating psycho-symbolic structure.

Alan Blum, York University

A Sociological View of the Background of Extremist Talk and Action: Sustaining a Shared Future for Dialogue

In my presentation I take up how Karl Marx, new left views, especially Eldridge Cleaver, and sociological descendants such as Irving Goffman, merge with a line of influence from Plato through Hegel, Freud, Wittgenstein, Simmel, Arendt, Gadamer, to Lacan and many others, that can enable us to conceive of a discourse joining the humanities and sociology on ways of formulating the background. As noted, in my research over time, this background as we understand it-as our subject- has to be language. We live in language, in the midst of its inheritance that is reflected in classifications and images.This inheritance governs our speech about values, evaluation, quality and the clichés that circulate around the question of meaning as an environment of knowledge, leading all of our opinions and beliefs to depend upon this inheritance as the thread of continuity that even underlies all of our efforts to modify and transgress it. As Wittgenstein says, the background as definitive as it is, is inexpressible or in his words, is not a thing but is not nothing either. Nothing we do can be defended absolutely and finally….Perhaps what is inexpressible(what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning”(Wittgenstein, 1980, 16e, page 17). I always start with Wittgenstein’s mantra that suggests how any belief or interpretation we do is ambiguous and at the same time tries to ensure its self-evidence as untouchable by eliciting automated overviews, commentary, and accounting schemes as if they are unambiguous and objective in the way of declarations, and denunciations rather than dialogue, a rhetorical infrastructure disclosed in clichés, platitudes, and all formulaic talk that always invites us to analyze its participation in a discourse. Now, in terms of the manifesto of this Congress, how can a divided, discordant society represent itself as sharing? Our interest in the background of thought and action as it is disclosed in language leads me to treat the Congress manifesto to discuss Sustaining a Shared Future as an opportunity to visualize research on sharing in a society such as ours. That is, can a capitalist society really do sharing or is it’s mechanical solidarity just a feint of togetherness that disguises the idea of life chances in order to serve its purposes. I wrote about this in detail in the Imaginative Structure of the City pp.215-222 on how Marx talked about this deceit as the secret of the proletariat (their scepticism about the bourgeoisie illusion of progress) as his version of repression correlative in its way to the self -deceiving unconscious. Max Weber frames the problem. “The fates of human beings are not equal. Men differ in their states of health or social status or what not...In every situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need to look upon his position as in some way "legitimate", upon his advantage as "deserved" and the others disadvantage as being brought about by the others "fault". That the purely accidental causes of the difference may be ever so obvious makes no difference.” Weber enunciates as a fundamental law of social life: “The reason for this fact lies in the generally observable need of any power, or even of any advantage of life, to justify itself.” If social life is a struggle for control of the conditions of determining meaning, then every advantage seeks to sustain itself as an advantage in a way that can be described as a fundamental law of life. Here Weber’s suggestion that every advantage of life justifies itself by virtue of the force of its self -determination alone means that it is essentially groundless, that it cannot ground itself by appealing to anything external to itself. What Weber’s comment suggests that any speech can be seen as if it is doing a justification of its advantage that functions to provide self- assurance for its speaker. Can this sociological vision of the background be a topic for dialogue rather than for exchanges of declarations and dogmatic declarations? Should the desire to sustain a shared future not be translated as a shared future capacity for dialogue about hate and any topic?