Noise or Music? Clutter or Shoe? On Attachment and Foreground Producing Strategies

This chapter reflects on the legacy of Zerubavel by taking stock of the role of emotions in this work. Using examples from Benzecry’s own research, this essay discusses how the work of Zerubavel has taken the institutional and binary character of our cognitive practices from Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life but erased the effervescence that the sacred/profane distinction resulted in. What would it look like if we bring emotions back in? What kind of mechanisms would we see? And how would the same people change over time the background/foreground attribution, which we usually observe at the meso level of collectives and institutions? This chapter aims at answering some of these questions by engaging in an exercise of analogical theorizing showing the surprising similarities and contrasts in foregrounding producing techniques across fields as disparate as psychoanalysis, sound engineering, music fandom and shoe design.