Introduction

Introduction Authority and affect-modelling A number of films well evoke the spirit and existential certainties of the departed British Empire and its even more utterly vanished pendant, the Habsburg Monarchy. There is, for example, Chariots of Fire (1981), an epic film of now iconic stature, which follows the making of British athletes through to Olympic triumph in the middle-distance track events. A numinous ‘Englishness’ that fairly evades the sociologist’s net shines through this saga of enterprise and fair play, of altercations with college authorities set against the spirit of commercialization, down to the final sporting breakthrough, as sensational as it is hard-won. Just such a tussle between university authorities and headstrong students, waged sotto voce but no less boisterously for all that, marked also by elements of great mutual respect and enacted in scenes of subtly deployed bodily language against the backdrop of an instantly recognizable college landscape, strikes the Continental observer as ‘typically English’, though she might be unable to say exactly why this is so. Altogether different is the impression made by grumpy privy councillors and fetching chamber maids (equally familiar fare to Austrian cinema-goers) in films starring the ‘people’s actor’ himself, Hans Moser: somehow we know stories like this could never have happened in London or Cambridge. But how do we know? What is it that makes these slightly absurd portrayals of moaning subalterns, ready to burst into song at the drop of a hat, so unmistakeably and so utterly Austrian? In this book we assume that such sociologically vexed questions will yield only, if at all, to a multi-layered analysis of authority and co-incident patterns of psychic sedimentation.