Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance

Abstract

Reviews 673 reconnecting and healing this fragmented population. In sum, this very readable and timely case study is relevant to a variety of audiences with interests in contemporary cultural and national identity-formation pro- cesses and issues for which conventional the- oretical approaches are inadequate or irrelevant. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance, by Eviatar Zerubavel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 199 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199366613. J ACK K ATZ University of California-Los Angeles jackkatz@soc.ucla.edu Books by Eviatar Zerubavel are almost impossible to review because they achieve perfectly what they attempt. And yet they must be reviewed, because what they attempt is consistently scintillating. The challenge is to connect Zeruvabel’s work to what most of the rest of us do. Again and again the reader is reminded of Simmel, who was sui generis and yet was quintessen- tially a sociologist. Simmel called his work a sociology of ‘‘forms,’’ Zerubavel calls what he does ‘‘cognitive sociology’’; and while both labels fit, neither instructs how to bridge the gains in knowledge they pro- vide, which are delivered at a universal level, to the vast majority of sociological studies, which are of people, or relationships, located in time and space. With Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Struc- ture of Irrelevance, a volume that can be read as a decade-delayed companion to The Ele- phant in the Room, Zerubavel is exploring and demonstrating the duality of fore- ground and background that constitutes vir- tually all moments of social life. At times he backs away from universalizing, but I think that, with a few exceptions, he concedes too much limitation to what he has found: his contribution to social ontology is espe- cially useful. The text, which has an endnote tying almost every sentence to someone else’s related insight, is organized to grasp the seemingly infinite number of previously segregated ways that academic researchers, philosophers, musicians, painters, game players—seemingly everyone who ever lived—have noted that an experience, whether understood as occurring within social life, psychologically (as a moment of perception or cognition), aesthetically (as craft knowledge), or physiologically (rods and cones in vision), has a ‘‘hidden’’ aspect, background, or periphery on or within which the foreground or main focal phe- nomenon is constructed. To convey the flavor, here are some more or less randomly selected tidbits. You can if you wish attend to the rhythm of your breathing, but usually you dis-attend to it in order to attend to something else. If you want to present your work as clearly artistic, you represent the spaces between the things that people attend to, like the shapes between buildings in the New York City skyline, invit- ing viewers to awaken to what they have always but never seen. Sometimes the back- up singers get attention, but not usually, even though the overall effect depends cru- cially on them. If you want to survive as a potential prey or be a well-nourished pred- ator, you had better stick to a landscape that blurs the visual boundaries of your body in color and form. Having lived a good part of my life around conversation analysts, I tend to recognize, as they do all the time, how peo- ple are unwittingly led to a background (i.e., not said to be noticed as such) image by drawing out a metaphor from the fore- ground of a just-prior utterance. My all- time favorite is a federal prosecutor in Miami announcing to the news media that, for his office, the conviction of major drug dealers was ‘‘a real shot in the arm.’’ Now, as to those exceptions. Some forms of meditation, OK. Maybe some religious, aes- thetic, and erotic experiences, which Zeru- bavel, in a stimulating way, just touches on. (There we go again). But near the end he concedes too much, suggesting that we’re just socialized to regard some things as in the foreground, others in the background: ‘‘we do not really have to choose between selective attention and open awareness, since they actually complement each other.’’ Well, no. Notwithstanding the rare moments in which one is tempted to drop actively shap- ing behavior and be taken to a consciousness that merges background and foreground, we do have to choose. Analytically, foreground Contemporary Sociology 45, 5 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com by guest on September 7, 2016