Civilisation and Informalisation: Connecting Long-Term Social and Psychic Processes [1st ed.] 978-3-030-00797-3, 978-3-030-00798-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxi
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Informalisation: An Introduction (Cas Wouters)....Pages 3-34
Informalisation and Evolution: Four Phases in the Development of Steering Codes (Cas Wouters)....Pages 35-51
Informalisation and Emancipation of Lust and Love: Integration of Sexualisation and Eroticisation since the 1880s (Cas Wouters)....Pages 53-80
Informalisation of Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the We–I Balance (Cas Wouters)....Pages 81-116
Informalisation, Functional Democratisation, and Globalisation (Cas Wouters)....Pages 117-160
Universally Applicable Criteria for Analysing Social and Psychic Processes: Nine Tension Balances, One Triad (Cas Wouters)....Pages 161-183
Front Matter ....Pages 185-185
Informalisation Through the Lens: Black & White and the Development of Photography as Art (Jonathan Fletcher)....Pages 187-215
Informalisation and Brutalisation: Jihadism as a Part-Process of Global Integration and Disintegration (Michael Dunning)....Pages 217-245
Informalisation and Sport: The Case of Jogging/Running in the USA (1960–2000) (Raúl Sánchez García)....Pages 247-266
Informalisation and Integration Conflicts: The Two-Faced Reception of Migrants in the Netherlands (Arjan Post)....Pages 267-289
Formalisation and Informalisation of Meeting Manners (Wilbert van Vree)....Pages 291-313
Informalisation, Sociological Theory and Social Diagnosis (Richard Kilminster)....Pages 315-346
Back Matter ....Pages 347-390

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Civilisation and Informalisation

Cas Wouters  •  Michael Dunning Editors

Civilisation and Informalisation Connecting Long-Term Social and Psychic Processes

Editors Cas Wouters Utrecht University Amsterdam The Netherlands

Michael Dunning University of Leicester Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-00797-3    ISBN 978-3-030-00798-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962368 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Ran Shauli This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This reader originated about five years ago as a plan for a book, to be made by me, Cas Wouters. It was meant to be executed in a slow and relaxed pace. The plan was soon enlarged when I started to ask colleagues and friends whether they would like to write a chapter that could be added to the book, that thus would amount to a reader on ‘Informalisation and …’ Gradually, I accumulated several people who showed an interest in the project of demonstrating the importance of the breakthrough and development of informalisation in their various fields of expertise. The pace of writing and realising the plan accelerated considerably in November 2017, when I heard that the Norbert Elias Foundation intended to fund the organisation of a symposium in honour of my contribution to sociology. Together with Arjan Post, who in an earlier phase of preparing for this book had accepted my invitation to contribute, we went to a Dutch publisher, but soon decided to find one with a broader international reach. This implied the necessity of finding someone with a high standard of English as a co-editor. In December, I asked Michael Dunning, who was also on the list of contributors, whether he would like to join me as a coeditor, and I was lucky and happy to find him available for this task. The reader has two parts of six chapters each, the first six are called ‘Civilisation and Informalisation: The Book’. They are written according to the original plan. ‘The Book’ contains a long first chapter on the origin of the concept, theory, and process of informalisation, and includes a secv

vi Preface

tion on how Norbert Elias has received them. It is partly written as a quest for processes comparable to informalisation, which lead to comparisons with the Renaissance and with shame and guilt cultures. A comparison of the kind I was looking for is found and discussed in the second chapter, featuring two complex developments from a formalisation of steering codes to their informalisation: developments in social processes from the second half of the nineteenth century and in biological evolutional processes of about 250,000 to 350,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens came into being. The third chapter focuses on changes in love-and-learn relations over a recent period of 150 years, conceptualised as changes in the lust-balance of sex and love. These changes define major conditions of the beginning of the life of individual people as babies and children. Chapter 4 highlights the end of individual people from studying changes in communities of mourning, mourning rituals, and in the collective sense of mortality. Chapter 5 considers whether recent phases of globalisation—global processes of social integration—have proceeded in the same direction, considering whether the process of social equalisation or ‘functional democratisation’ and informalisation are following suit, or were accompanied by part-processes of disintegration and integration conflicts. Chapter 6 is a theoretical summary from the perspective of a number of balances that have been used in the book; it tries to bring them together in a ‘sociology of balances’. The six chapters that follow ‘the Book’, and together compose the whole of this reader, are written by six authors on the basis of their expertise in different fields; they are presented together under the title ‘Civilisation and Informalisation: The Selection’. Chapter 7, by Jonathan Fletcher, explores formalising and informalising phases of photography as art in Europe and the United States from the end of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the role of black and white in ‘fine art photography’. In Chapter 8, Michael Dunning examines the relationship between Salafi-jihadism and processes of brutalisation, global integration, disintegration, and informalisation.

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vii

Raúl Sánchez García, in Chapter 9, applies informalisation to the development of jogging/running, and shows how there has been a spiralling of informalisation and reformalisation from the 1960s to the 1990s in the sport. In Chapter 10 Arjan Post explores integration conflicts and immigration with particular reference to the Netherlands, and how, as part of established-­outsider relations, immigrants are blamed as ‘uncivilised’ for not adapting to informal codes of conduct. Chapter 11, by Wilbert van Vree, focuses on the formalisation and informalisation of ‘meeting manners’, and shows how over the long term ways of conducting meetings have at first been formalised and then been subject to informalising processes. The final Chapter is by Richard Kilminster in which he uses the theory of informalisation to illuminate the social and psychological effects of the recent spurt of globalisation, while providing a critical examination of the shortcomings of three major contemporary theorists—Maffesoli, Giddens, and Bauman. He argues that unlike the theory of informalisation, these theorists fail to take into account human beings in the round and that we are bonded in interdependencies. Amsterdam, The Netherlands Leicester, UK 

Cas Wouters Michael Dunning

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Norbert Elias Foundation for funding a symposium annex book presentation to honour my contribution to sociology. In the editing process of this reader with Michael Dunning, I have learned a lot from him and I have enjoyed working with him. Thank you, Michael! Stephen Vertigans has stimulated me in many ways. Over the last five years, we have been talking about producing a book, now this book, and we had many of these discussions in Amsterdam at stop-overs on his way to Africa. Stephen also read the chapters that are gathered here in Part One, The Book, and he made many useful comments. Many thanks, Stephen! In the earlier versions of Chapters 3, 4, and 6, I thank Stephen Mennell for correcting my English according to his high standard of written English. On one occasion, I added: He has ‘Mennellised’ most of my English publications and thus put me on the English map, so to speak. I feel deeply grateful. For Chapter 2, I thank Jon Fletcher for his friendship, shown on that occasion, by helping me write this chapter and correcting my English. I also thank Andrew Linklater, Stephen Vertigans, Arjan Post, and Richard Kilminster for stimulating comments, and Richard also for his support and understanding. During the time of writing, I learned from ix

x Acknowledgements

e­ volutionary biologist Bart Voorzanger, and physicist Paul Rump even helped me to understand my own chapter better. In an earlier version of Chapter 4, I thank many people working in the undertaking business for their time and information. For their valuable comments I thank Rineke van Daalen, Richard Kilminster, Michael Schröter, and Eric Vermeulen. Chapter 5 was written with helpful comments by Stephen Vertigans, Richard Kilminster, Arjan Post, Andrew Linklater, and Jonathan Fletcher, and Jon also for correcting my English. I am deeply grateful. I also want to bring a general salute to my ‘Irish connection’, my ‘Berlin, German, Austrian, and my Brasilian connections’, my Belgium, and my English one: Thank you all! As a father and grandfather, I wish to thank my two daughters and their children Sam, Julia, Oskar, and Olivia for their presence in my life. And I am most grateful to enjoy the almost daily presence of my wife Truus, my ‘down to earth’. Many thanks go to Cas Wouters with whom I have enjoyed immensely editing this reader, and who has also helped me develop my own chapter. It’s been enlightening and a pleasure. I’d also like to thank Andrew Linklater and Stephen Vertigans for their comments and encouragement in terms of both my chapter and my research more generally, which has been invaluable. Jason Hughes has also been instrumental in the development of my sociology. Thanks, Jason. Huge thanks to my wife Laura and two daughters, Florence and Isabelle, for their love, support, and understanding.

Names of Authors

Cas Wouters Jonathan Fletcher Michael Dunning Raúl Sánchez García Arjan Post Wilbert van Vree Richard Kilminster

xi

Contents

Preface

  v

Acknowledgements

  ix

Notes on Contributors

  xix

Part One Civilisation and Informalisation: The Book. Six Chapters by Cas Wouters

   1

1 Informalisation: An Introduction  3 1.1 Signposts   3 1.2 Western Social Codes in Phases from Formalisation to Informalisation  6 1.3 Two Implications of Introducing Informalisation as a Theory and as a Process  10 1.4 Excursus: Norbert Elias and Informalisation  15 1.5 Informalisation and the Transformation Known as the Renaissance 23 1.6 Informalisation and the Necessary Critical Degree of Preceding Formalisation  26 xiii

xiv Contents

1.7 Social and Psychic Integration and Integration Conflicts 28 1.8 A Shift from Guilt to Shame and Shaming  30 1.9 Traditional Shame Cultures, Inner-­Directed Guilt Cultures, and Other-­Directed Shame Cultures  32 2 Informalisation and Evolution: Four Phases in the Development of Steering Codes 35 2.1 Preview and Signposts  35 2.2 Two Sequential Long-term Processes of Formalisation and Informalisation  38 2.3 Two Transitions from Formalisation to Informalisation: A Theoretical Comparison  46 3 Informalisation and Emancipation of Lust and Love: Integration of Sexualisation and Eroticisation since the 1880s 53 3.1 Preview  53 3.2 Formalisation and Informalisation  54 3.3 Informalisation in Relations Between Parents and Children 56 3.4 Gender and Sex: The Lust Balance  58 3.5 Trial and Error as Collective Processes: Sexualisation and Eroticisation  59 3.6 Trial and Error Before the 1960s: Two Social Class Trajectories 61 3.7 New Practices and New Concepts  62 3.8 Process Continuities in Class Differences Before and After the 1960s  64 3.9 Connecting Sexual and Relational Intimacy: Trial and Error Since the 1960s  65 3.10 Avoiding Old Practices and a Quest for New Words  72 3.11 Recent Developments Towards Integration  74 a) Sexual Intimidation, Sexual Violence, and #MeToo   74 b) Declining Differences Between Social Classes   77 3.12 Where Are We Now? Paradoxes and Interpretations  78

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xv

4 Informalisation of Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the We–I Balance 81 4.1 Introduction  81 4.2 Changes in the We–I Balance: Solidarisation and Individualisation 84 4.3 From a ‘Regime of Silence and Sacred Lies’ to an ‘Emancipation of Emotions’  86 4.4 From Fixed Rules in Closed Networks Towards Flexible Rules in Open Networks  89 4.5 Rituals and Feelings of Despair and Powerlessness  92 4.6 Tugs of War and Ambivalence Towards Mourning Ritual 95 4.7 Nostalgic Longing for Old We-Identities 100 4.8 Phases in Individual and Social Processes: Changes in the We–I Balance 101 4.9 The ‘Memento Mori’ Function of Public Debates on Euthanasia112 4.10 Epilogue on the Need for a Modern ‘Memento Mori’ 114 5 Informalisation, Functional Democratisation, and Globalisation117 5.1 Functional Democratisation or ‘Diminishing Contrasts’ and Informalisation or ‘Increasing Varieties’ as Side Effects of Differentiation and Integration Processes118 5.2 The Introduction of Functional Democratisation and Its ‘Counterpart’ 125 5.3 Processes of Integration with Part-­Processes of Disintegration and Defunctionalisation as Unintended Side Effects: Examples on Various Levels 132 5.4 Growing Interdependence Triggers an Ambivalence That Reduces Power Potentials Between Groups: Functional Democratisation 139 5.5 Decolonisation as an Example of Functional Democratisation142

xvi Contents

5.6 On Processes of Social Differentiation and Integration: The Force of the Competition and Interweaving Mechanism144 5.7 On the Shifting Balance of Power Between Politicians (Physical Safety) and Business People (Material Security) 147 5.8 Where Are We Now? 158 6 Universally Applicable Criteria for Analysing Social and Psychic Processes: Nine Tension Balances, One Triad161 6.1 Introduction 161 6.2 The Triad of Basic Controls 163 6.3 Nine Tension Balances 168 6.4 Conclusion 183 Part Two Civilisation and Informalisation: The Selection. Six Chapters by Six Authors  185 7 Informalisation Through the Lens: Black & White and the Development of Photography as Art187 Jonathan Fletcher 7.1 Summary 187 7.2 The Contemporary Appeal of Black & White 188 7.3 Four Phases in the Development of Photography as Art 191 a) Co-existence: Early 1840s–Mid-1880s  191 b) Challenge: Mid-1880s–Early 1900s  195 c) Emancipation: Early 1900s–Early 1960s  198 d) Integration: Early 1960s–Present  202 7.4 Informalisation, Black & White and Photography as Art 205 a) Individualisation and Good Society  205 b) P  hotography, Photographers and the Established-­ Outsider Dynamic  207 c) Aestheticisation and the Aesthetic Tension-Balance  209 d) Formalisation and Photographic Realism  212 e) Monochrome and the Quest for Authenticity  213

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xvii

8 Informalisation and Brutalisation: Jihadism as a Part-­ Process of Global Integration and Disintegration217 Michael Dunning 8.1 Introduction 217 8.2 Global Social Processes and the Growth of Salafi-­ Jihadism219 8.3 Integration, Equalisation and Informalisation 223 8.4 Salafi-Jihadists and the Stigmatisation of the West 228 8.5 ISIS Brutality 231 8.6 Integration Conflicts and Defunctionalisation 233 8.7 Brutalisation as a Paradigmatic Process 235 8.8 The Process of Brutalisation in Iraq 237 8.9 The Process of Brutalisation in the West 239 8.10 Conclusion 244 9 Informalisation and Sport: The Case of Jogging/Running in the USA (1960–2000)247 Raúl Sánchez García 9.1 Introduction 247 9.2 The Informalising Phase of Jogging/Running in the USA During the 1960s and 1970s 251 a) The Formalising Trend  253 b) The Informalising Trend  253 9.3 Early Reformalisation Phase of Jogging/Running During the 1980s 256 9.4 The Late Reformalisation Phase of Running During the 1990s 260 9.5 Concluding Remarks 265 10 Informalisation and Integration Conflicts: The Two-Faced Reception of Migrants in the Netherlands267 Arjan Post 10.1 Introduction: Informalisation and Re-formalisation 267 10.2 The Minorisation of Minorities 270 10.3 From Xenophilia to Xenophobia in the 1980s 275

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10.4 A Multi-level Model of Integration Conflicts 10.5 Reflection: The Paradox of Permissiveness

282 288

11 Formalisation and Informalisation of Meeting Manners291 Wilbert van Vree 11.1 The Meeting Concept 291 11.2 The Emergence of Collective Steering Capacities 292 11.3 Meetings in Foragers’ Societies 294 11.4 Meetingisation and Autocratisation 294 11.5 Meetingisation in Agrarian Societies 297 11.6 Parliamentarisation of Meeting Behaviour 299 11.7 Informalisation of Meeting Manners in Parliamentary-Industrial Societies 301 11.8 Meeting Regimes and Self-Control 305 11.9 The Meetingisation of Work 307 11.10 Two Meeting Models 309 12 Informalisation, Sociological Theory and Social Diagnosis315 Richard Kilminster 12.1 Preface 315 12.2 Sociology, Para-sociology and Informalisation 318 12.3 (1) Neo-tribes: The Decline of Individualism? 323 12.4 (2) Reflexive Modernisation as Political Conceit 328 12.5 (3) Liquid Marxism: The Pyrrhic Victory of Metaphor over Evidence 336 12.6 Concluding Remarks 342 References347 Index371

Notes on Contributors

Michael Dunning  is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester. He holds a PhD from Brunel University in 2014, researching the sociogenesis of terrorism in Britain, and has since published a number of journal articles on this problem. He is now turning his thesis into a book. His main research interests include the processes and relationships that contribute to the development of ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’, and figurational sociology more generally. Jonathan  Fletcher  is a writer, branding consultant, and photographer. After completing his PhD at King’s College, Cambridge, he subsequently spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. His book, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias, was published in 1997. After working for more than 20 years in international advertising, design, and brand strategy, his current focus is analogue black and white art photography. Richard Kilminster  is an honorary research fellow at the University of Leeds and has made profound contribution to sociology in his The Sociological Revolution (1998) and Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology (2007). Both studies take the discipline to higher levels of synthesis integrating sociological theory and the sociology of knowledge with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary biology. Kilminster edited Norbert Elias’s Early Writings and The Symbol Theory, and co-edited other titles of Elias’s collected works.

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Notes on Contributors

Arjan Post  is a sociologist, secretary of the Norbert Elias Foundation, and an independent editor for literary publishers. His thesis on informalisation, reformalisation and civilisation was published in the Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift and in the Irish Journal of Sociology. He introduced Norbert Elias’s unpublished lecture on integration and immigration for Human Figurations (2016) and is working on twenty-first-century integration conflicts. He is also conducting research on Norbert Elias in Ghana. Raúl  Sánchez  García  is Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at the Universidad Europea in Madrid and is the president of the Sociology of Sport working group (Spanish Federation of Sociology). He has published numerous journal papers and is the author of Fighting scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports; and Exciting Processes: Norbert Elias’ Unpublished Papers on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture. His forthcoming book is The Historical Sociology of Martial Arts in Japan. Wilbert  van Vree  was formerly Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD—Nederland als vergaderland—in 1994. His book Meetings, Manners and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour won the Norbert Elias Prize in 2001. He has written several articles about long-term trends in meeting behaviour and authored practical guides on meeting. Wilbert is also the director of a consultancy for improving meeting cultures and skills. Cas Wouters  studied sociology at the University of Amsterdam in the 1960s. He has been teaching at Utrecht University, and as a researcher, he was also a staff member of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. He’s published numerous articles and books on changes in regimes of power, manners, and emotion regulation, which have appeared in Dutch, English, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese. These include Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (2004) and Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (2007). In 2012, his process study of changes in youth sexuality since the 1880s was published in Dutch as De jeugd van tegenwoordig: Emancipatie van liefde en lust sinds 1880 (‘Young people today!’—Emancipation of Love and Lust since 1880).

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 11.1

Didactic aid Didactic aid with self-regulation Steering codes Togunas. Photographed by Jan Joost Peskens (2018)

16 17 40 306

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Part One Civilisation and Informalisation: The Book. Six Chapters by Cas Wouters

1 Informalisation: An Introduction

1.1 Signposts The concept of informalisation was developed as a more adequate rival concept to ‘permissiveness’. Whereas both in fact refer to the same social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘permissiveness’ only emphasises the ‘relaxation’ in the standards of behaviour. As such, these changes were welcomed by many as an increase of ‘liberty’, while others saw them as a decline of moral standards. The concept of informalisation provides a synthesis beyond this moral opposition. It acknowledges the increase of options and varieties but does not interpret this increase as a ‘relaxation’ on the self-steering capacity of individuals. On the contrary, living up to the demands of the relaxed standards of behaviour is not easier; it is more difficult. It involves a rise of demands on self-steering capacity, not a decline. As a sociological concept, informalisation has been used to describe how and why social and psychic relations in the West since the 1880s have tended to become less status-ridden, less stiff and rigid, and have moved towards more informal, lenient, and flexible codes of manners

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_1

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Cas Wouters

and emotion regulation. The concept was first used in the 1960s and 1970s to help interpret the tumultuous transformations of those decades. Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes gave rise to the question ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’ Lively debates formed the cradle of my theory of informalisation, founded on the insight that more lenient and varied codes of manners implied rising demands on steering capacities, the latter being a continuation of civilising processes, the former a change of its direction. Accordingly, two phases were discerned: first, a long-term formalising phase in which steering codes expanded, gained rigidity, and became more demanding, subjecting more and more aspects of behaviour to increasingly strict and detailed social regulations such as traditions, customs, habits, manners, and laws. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as social codes lost rigidity and gained plasticity, changing rather fixed socially learned codes in the direction of flexible guidelines, formalisation lost its dominance to informalisation: an ongoing process of social codes changing towards greater leniency and variety, again raising demands on self-steering amid expanding possibilities and options to adjust more flexibly to changing conditions of life, while simultaneously compelling psychic processes to be more versatile and more strongly dominated by consciousness. The concepts and the processes of formalisation and informalisation of social steering codes are still not well-known and awareness of these two long-term phases is confined to relatively small circles. In various walks of life, the transition to a phase of informalisation since the 1870s has not been identified as such, nor has it been recognised that its part-processes together constitute a much more broadly encompassing long-term process that represents a breakthrough in human history. Two related obstacles to wider recognition are obvious. The first occurs when changes in regimes of manners and emotions are experienced as either too constraining or not constraining enough, and they are duly perceived and discussed predominantly in a moral framework. Their direction, if discussed at all, becomes part of a moral contest, which means that they are also addressed mainly in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, which, as a rule, blocks a more detached perspective. Changes involving the balance of power between groups of outsiders such as workers,

  Informalisation: An Introduction 

5

women, children, young people, black people vis-à-vis established groups provide many examples of becoming subjected to a moral contest. The second obstacle occurs when changes that were once contested are in the process of becoming accepted and taken for granted. In this case, raising them is usually experienced as embarrassing, so they are therefore mollified. Thus, they remain unconnected to a broader theoretical framework. Norbert Elias studied, described, and interpreted six centuries of the long-term phase of formalisation in socially learned steering codes as a civilising process (2012a). I have studied the subsequent phase of informalisation in a global perspective, but particularly in Europe and the USA (Wouters 2004, 2007). This research strengthened my growing conviction that the importance of this social and psychic transformation in dominance from formalisation to informalisation is underestimated. Further explication of the transition in social steering codes seems necessary. In this introductory chapter, this is done from several angles and in a number of sections that follow. First, the transition into dominance from formalisation to informalisation in the wealthier countries of the West is expounded in a general sketch, illustrated by some examples. Three short-term phases within a long-term phase of informalisation are distinguished here: (1) the Fin de Siècle, (2) the Roaring Twenties, and (3) the Expressive Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In various ways, each short-term phase involved broader sections of the population, and each was followed by a phase of ‘re-formalisation’ in which many earlier informalised social codes were integrated into the prevailing code and were thus formalised (Wouters 1986). The overall direction of these changes in the balance of formalisation and informalisation in favour of the latter is indicated by longer-­ term developments such as diminishing social and psychic distance, continued ‘emancipation of emotions’—their appearance in the centre of personality: consciousness—and rising demands on consciousness via a more reflexive and flexible self-regulation. The discovery of the wide scope and radius of the long-term process of dominant informalisation led to the view of the civilising process as comprising two successive long-­ term phases—formalisation and informalisation. Later in this chapter, I present examples of why informalisation demands a critical degree of

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Cas Wouters

f­ ormalisation that precedes it, together with the development of a habitus that incorporates a critical level of taken-for-granted social and self-­ controls, before a viable degree of informalisation can proceed. Seen from all these angles, three significant and interconnected process drivers of informalisation are suggested: the rise to critical levels of (1) competition and co-operation, (2) social differentiation and integration of social functions, and (3) functional democratisation in expanding networks of interdependency. The discussion of these processes, particularly the process of functional democratisation, will be continued in Chapter 5 of this book.

1.2 W  estern Social Codes in Phases from Formalisation to Informalisation Although not much is known about the early stages of human history, it seems possible to capture the changes over the course of these thousands of years as a long-term process of formalisation. This generalisation can be supported by making reference to the expansion of the triad of human controls: over nature (technology), over each other via the social controls of organisation, and over themselves via increasingly demanding socially inherited traditions, habits, manners, and other regimes of behaviour and emotions (Elias 2012b: 151–152; cf. Wouters 2014a, chapter 6). This very  long-term expansion of controls went hand in hand with social steering codes becoming more extensive, more rigid, fixed, and detailed, signalling how people came to demand more and more elaborate ­discipline from each other. It was a globally dominant process of formalisation of steering codes, involving growing numbers of people and groups in competition and co-operation that fuelled ongoing differentiation and  integration of social functions in expanding networks of interdependency. Norbert Elias’s study, On the Process of Civilisation (2012a), is based on various series of examples that can be seen as representations of a long-­ term phase of formalising manners and disciplining people. Elias shows how, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century in secular upper classes of dominant parts of Europe, ‘dangerous’ emotions such as those

  Informalisation: An Introduction 

7

related to physical force (including sexual violence) came to be avoided, repressed, and denied in increasingly automatic ways, becoming more regulated by the inner fears of a rather rigid and authoritarian conscience. With multiple series of examples, Elias shows how, driven by the disciplinary forces of expanding interdependency networks, particularly state formation and market expansion, a ‘second nature’ steering code, that is, a conscience-dominated type of personality, emerged and became dominant: ‘commands and prohibitions become increasingly a part of the self, a strictly regulated superego’ (Elias 2012a: 183). This process accelerated in the period in which bourgeois classes entered and came to dominate the centres of power and their ‘good society’. In the nineteenth century, social constraints towards self-restraints continued to rise, particularly via an expanding entrepreneurial and professional bourgeoisie and an expanding market. The rise of this ‘second nature’ type of discipline and self-regulation was also a process of psychic formalisation: the formation of a habitus or ‘inner compass’ (Riesman et al. 1950) of relatively fixed/rigid habits and reflexes, captured in expressions such as stiff upper lip and—later—tight-­ ass. Parallel to the development of this type of personality and its characteristic steering code was the rising fear of the slippery slope, the fear that without rigorous discipline even the slightest lack of control would irrevocably lead to loss of face and an end in the gutter. This fear of the slippery slope is typical of rather authoritarian relations and social controls, as well as a relatively authoritarian and automatically functioning conscience. Inclinations towards dissoluteness were feared to the extent that people believed they ought to be nipped in the bud, particularly in children, because without such rigorous control, their ‘first nature’ might run wild.1 In raising children, therefore, rule number one was enforcing their obedience.

 I use the term ‘first nature’ to refer to the urges and affects that stem from the ‘animalic nature’ that human beings share with many other animals: vertebrates, mammals, and especially primates. This ‘animalic nature’ is not ahistorical and immutable: ‘The libidinal energies which one encounters in any living human being are always already socially processed; they are, in other words, sociogeneti1

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In the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century, the phase of formalising manners and disciplining people changed in the direction of less fixed and less rigid social codes, allowing for more varied, flexible, colourful, and expressive behaviour; a process of informalisation became dominant.2 The following three examples describe the social codes involved in informalisation processes, illuminating the contours of their preceding long-term process of formalisation. The first example is about the wearing of corsets, a practice spread from Spanish aristocratic women in the sixteenth century to other strata and other countries and which flourished in the nineteenth century. The spread of the corset symbolises the spread of increasing control over the body—loose clothes came to indicate loose morals. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for instance in the movement for the reform of clothing, ideals of naturalness combined with ideals of beauty. From then on, until the 1960s, the boned corset came to be used only as an orthopaedic gadget for female bodies gone out of control, ones that burst the boundaries of the prevailing standard of beauty. This standard increasingly contained ideals of naturalness, but not without control: much female flesh that was not quantitatively excessive remained controlled by corset-like underwear, girdles, straps, corselets, and bras. Only at the end of the 1960s did women succeed in liberating their bodies from this kind of control. However, it was not a full-blown liberation. It was clearly an example of controlled decontrolling, in which the control of the corset over the body was continued as self-control: women turned heavily to diets, sports, aerobics, fitness, home trainers, and other forms of ‘working

cally transformed in their function and structure, and can in no way be separated from the corresponding ego and superego structures […] What matters, what determines conduct, are the balances and conflicts between people’s malleable drives and the built-in drive-controls’ (Elias 2012a: 452). 2  The informalisation of social steering codes is not restricted to the wealthier countries of the West, but in non-Western societies these codes are far more compartmentalised, prevailing only or mainly within established circles and are not dominant outside of them. This regularity shows how strongly the level of informalisation in a society depends on its level of integration.

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the body’ such as plastic surgery (Steele 2001). An illustration of the same process is in the transition from the ‘hard look’ bra that was still common in the 1950s and early 1960s to the ‘soft look’ bra, introduced in the 1970s, when some women had given up wearing bras altogether. The corset and the hard-look bra symbolise the dominance of a rigid second-­ nature type of control over ‘first nature’, while the soft look bra and not wearing a corset (or bra) symbolise the ideal of reaching back to ‘natural’ beauty. The second example is the relationship between the dying and those who continue to live. Here, the traditional formal steering code that dying patients were to be kept under the illusion that there was a fair chance of recovery—doctors conducting a regime of silence and sacred lies, hardly ever informing the dying of their terminal condition—changed to the expectation, and for doctors even the judicial obligation, to be open and inform them of the reality of their situation (see Chapter 4). Thirdly, the practices and ideals of divorced couples have also taken a 180-degree turn: the traditional expectation that they would stop seeing each other is gradually being replaced by the expectation of having a ‘good after-marriage’: the ex-couple maintain a friendship or work towards being on friendly terms again, particularly if they are responsible for raising children (Veeninga 2008). The last two examples also show a striking change in the expression of feelings, indicating that it has become quite common to admit dangerous feelings such as lust or hatred, anger or envy, and yet not act upon them. The shift in the long-term Western process of formalisation into a relatively short-term but enduring phase of informalisation of manners saw an ‘emancipation of emotions’: emotions that had been denied and repressed regained3 access to consciousness and wider acceptance in social codes. On the relational, social levels, this involved the informalisation of

 The word ‘regained’ cannot be taken literally, of course, as emotions that find more direct or less reflected expression in behaviour differ from emotions that find access into a type of consciousness that allows for processing them into a large variety of ways of expressing and/or repressing them. Emotions have three components: (a) a behavioural component, (b) a feeling component, and (c) and 3

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social codes such as manners and laws, while on the psychic level it involved an informalisation in patterns of emotion regulation. Informalisation processes have continued into the twenty-first century: there was a continued rise of social constraints towards being ­unconstrained and yet reflective, flexible, and alert. But it is only since the Expressive Revolution (1965–1975) that standards of self-control have increasingly enabled people to admit to themselves and others that they have ‘dangerous’ emotions without provoking shame, particularly the shame-fear of having to give in, of losing control and losing face.4 Openness about emotions has been growing ever since, together with a keen interest in their regulation.

1.3 T  wo Implications of Introducing Informalisation as a Theory and as a Process I first became involved in the study of these changes back in the 1960s, when Amsterdam was still a self-declared ‘magical centre’ in which a wave of informalisation was rising up against traditionally established relationships. At the Sociological Institute, colleagues often discussed the changes in manners and morals occurring at the time with reference to Norbert Elias’s ‘Über den Prozess’, as we abbreviated the title of his book that was available only in German. For many, including me, a key question emerged: ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’—a question for which I provided an answer in an article with this title published in 1976. Until then, Norbert Elias’s own answer to the same question had remained somewhat unclear, even ambivalent (see the next section for details). So I set out to find a theoretical solution by using the concepts of ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ and ‘informalisation’ of manners. a physical component, respectively referring to social/relational processes, psychic, and biological processes. 4  Shame is a social fear, but only some social fears appear in the conscientious form called shame. This is expressed in the concept: shame-fear.

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In my thesis of 1971, I have used the expression ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ in the context of describing broad processes since the Victorian era. In them, I wrote, power differences diminished, dividing lines between social classes also diminished, together with inherent ways of keeping a distance, thus making the reputation of more people more dependent upon a more cautious regulation of manners and emotions. This more cautious self-steering paradoxically enabled people to express a wider range of emotions in an increasing variety of domains, no longer only back-stage. At this point, I write: ‘In his description of this, Elias does justice to the paradox just mentioned. He calls it an increase of “controlled decontrolling of emotional controls”’. In fact, however, Elias did not. I had done so myself by extending the use of his expression to much wider social and psychic processes than he had done himself, yet I did attribute it to him; in a note I added: ‘Elias during lectures in Amsterdam, 1970’.5 These concepts of ‘controlled decontrolling’ and ‘informalisation’ helped to acknowledge the relaxation and liberation of social codes as well as how people are burdened by this liberation: how, since the late nineteenth century, more lenient and looser steering codes of behaviour and feeling have gone hand in hand with rising pressures of social controls on self-controls. They implied a ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’, an ‘emancipation of emotions’, or ‘psychic informalisation’, and they involved an increase rather than a decrease in the demands on individual steering capacities (cf. Wouters 2007: 230, 241; Waldhoff [2014] for a recent application of the concept ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’). Elaborating upon this interpretation, I soon realised it had two important implications. The first arose from closer inspection of the period in

 In later years, I found variants of this expression in Elias’s publications with Eric Dunning on sports and leisure, but only after Elias’s Collected Works were published, I could compare all these expressions and conclude that their meanings remain restricted to sports, leisure, and ‘the spare-­time spectrum’ (Elias and Dunning 2008: 73–106; see Sect. 1.4, Chapter 1). In 1970, however, I had taken the meaning of ‘controlled decontrolling’ far beyond that spectrum into an Age of Informalisation gaining ascendancy all over the West. 5

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which informalising processes had been dominant. It soon led me to identify three short-term phases or spurts within the wider long-term phase; they are, as indicated earlier in this chapter, (1) the Fin de Siècle, (2) the Roaring Twenties, and (3) the Expressive Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Each spurt involved broader layers of the population, first mainly among the upper classes with old and new money, then in the 1920s among the middle classes, and from the 1960s onwards encompassing an increasingly larger majority of whole populations. These waves of informalisation appeared to coincide with changes in the balances of power between the classes within countries, and in the period after World War II, also between colonising and colonised countries. They also seemed to go hand in hand with rising levels of knowledge and consciousness. An intense—though rather concealed—competition in knowledge, including self-knowledge, gave rise to the necessity to be more reflexive and flexible. These waves were experienced and expressed in virtually all walks of life, in spheres of work and of love; for example, in more open and playful codes of manners and feelings regulating relations between women and men in courting, sex, love, and marriage (Wouters 2004, 2014a), as well as in relations between the classes, ages, and ranks in the worlds of politics, business, industry, education, religion, friendship, body and health care, dying, mourning (Wouters 2002), and many more (Wouters 2007). They can also be seen in the realms of imagination and the arts, in new styles/forms of literature, architecture, painting, movies and music, and in styles such as art nouveau/Jugendstil, impressionism, and expressionism. In this reader, further examples presented are sociology and social diagnosis, jihadism, meeting manners, sports (jogging/running), immigration, and photography. My analysis of informalising processes developed into a research project that aimed to find, compare, and interpret changes in American, Dutch, English, and German manners books published since the 1880s. The project generated two books, Sex and Manners (2004) and Informalisation (2007). Among the general trends they cover were a declining social and psychic distance between social classes, sexes, and generations; a mixing of codes and ideals; increasingly complex and longer chains of interdependence; an informalisation of manners; expanding mutual identification; an ‘emancipation of emotions’, and rising demands on emotion

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regulation. On the whole, expressions of superiority and inferiority were increasingly tabooed—except in the realms of imagination such as literature and film and to some extent in sports—and rather fixed rules of manners turned into flexible guidelines to be applied according to the specific characteristics of situations and relations, interpreted as the rise of a third-nature type of self-regulation. All these changes are closely related. They seem to be part of increasing social (national and international) integration processes occurring all over the world, although of course to varying degrees. Stronger taboos on expressions of superiority and inferiority—do not shout at people or boss them around, and do not take liberties with subordinates—together with stronger ideals of equality emerged from processes of decolonisation and the emancipation of groups such as the working classes, women, children, young people, and homosexuals. For example, the emancipation of women went hand in hand with an emancipation of their sexuality (but not only theirs) and more intense and demanding relations of intimacy and love. And at the same time, parents of different social classes, to varying degrees, have taken the interests and feelings of their children, and the sexuality of their teenagers, more into account. Thus, the emancipation of sexuality coincided with warmer loving relations, bolstering up a more general emancipation of emotions, including both love and lust (see Chapter 3). The traditional steering of behaviour and emotions via expansion and specification of social codes changed direction: prescriptions and prohibitions increasingly developed in the direction of guidelines and directives, the application of which depended on their particular relational context. This trend implied an increase of behavioural and emotional options. At the same time, social steering codes also became stricter regarding the expression of feelings of superiority and inferiority and more demanding as these changes exerted pressure in the direction of a more alert, flexible, and sensitive social navigation towards widening circles of identification and rising levels of empathy, growing social and psychic knowledge, and a more reflexive and flexible self-regulation. There is evidence of a ‘third nature’ type of personality emerging to the extent that it has become ‘natural’ to perceive the pulls and pushes of both ‘first nature’ and ‘second

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nature’, as well as both the short-term and long-term dangers and opportunities of any relationship or situation. The development of such a third-nature habitus involves an attempt to reach back to ‘first nature’ without losing any of the control that was provided by ‘second nature’, the self-regulating conscience that functions to a large extent automatically. Thus, the rise of a ‘third-nature personality’ demands and depends on an emancipation of ‘first nature’ as well as ‘second nature’. The disuse of the corset may serve as a didactic example of ‘bringing the body back in’ and of reaching back to ‘first nature’ by domesticating the naked body, clearly demonstrating the impossibility of ever getting to know and experience ‘first nature’.6 Since the 1980s, a stylised visible corset has reappeared as a playfully provocative form of erotic display, but as it is taken for granted that the women who wear one do not need such a corset for controlling their bodies, the visible corset can also be taken as a symbol of how ideals of beauty, naturalness, and self-control have merged with each other—another indication of the spread of a third-nature personality. However, in developing this type of personality, people will most probably continue attempts to achieve ‘authenticity’, the ideal of a perfect balance of first, second, and third nature. The second implication of the discovery of a long-term process of informalisation was that the civilising process had now come to comprise two long-term phases: first, a long-term process of formalisation that lost its dominance somewhere in the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century, and a second phase involving a shorter, but still long-term process in which informalisation became dominant. Elias’s research had not fully covered the latter part of this long-term phase characterised by informalisation. In fact he had made only an occasional reference to it with one or two quotations from the nineteenth century and some sparse

 Acknowledging this impossibility, we can only further our understanding through a comparative study of the processes preceding the long-term formalisation and informalisation of social and psychic steering codes, that is, to look at the evolution of innate codes and patterns for steering behaviour and emotions. This is done in Chapter 2. 6

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remarks on the twentieth. In the following excursus, the theory of informalisation processes is compared with Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes and his response to both the theory and process of informalisation.

1.4 E  xcursus: Norbert Elias and Informalisation Until Elias read my rough translation of the Dutch version of ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’ (Wouters 1976), he remained ambivalent about the changes captured in the concept of informalisation. On the one hand, he stuck to the interpretation of similar changes in the 1920s that he had briefly presented in On the Process of Civilisation in 1939. In this discussion he admits: Many things forbidden earlier are now permitted. And, seen at close quarters, the movement seems to be proceeding in the direction opposite to that shown here; it seems to lead to a relaxation of the constraints imposed on individuals by social life. (2012a: 182) ‘Many things forbidden earlier are now permitted’ mirrors ‘Thingis somtime alowed is now repreuid’ (‘Many things permitted earlier are now forbidden’), a sentence from Caxton’s Book of Curtesy, one of Elias’s sources from the late fifteenth century. Elias had used this sentence to describe the direction of the whole movement of change; he wrote: ‘This sounds, indeed, like a motto for the whole movement that is now coming: “Thingis somtime alowed is now repreuid”’ (Elias 2012a: 89; Wouters 1976: 354). However, the quotation on changes in the 1920s continues with Elias dissociating himself from this perspective: ‘But on closer examination it is not difficult to perceive that this is merely a very slight recession [my italics], one of the fluctuations that constantly arise from the complexity of the historical movement within each phase of the total process.’ Even the opening sentence to this section (‘The process of civilisation does not follow a straight line’) is probably meant to serve as a

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prelude to his argument that the relaxation of constraints was limited and temporary, that he perceives ‘precursors of a shift towards the cultivation of new and stricter constraints’ in recent ‘attempts to establish a social regulation and management of the emotions far stronger and more conscious than the standard prevalent hitherto’. Elias obviously expected the continuation of civilising processes as he had described: social codes becoming increasingly forbidding, prescribing, and demanding—a long-­ term rise in the level of social constraints towards self-constraints (Elias 2012a [1939]: 181–182). In 1939, Elias included bathing manners of the 1920s as being ‘limited and temporary’. However, by 1974, the trend allowing people to show more of the naked human body had clearly continued, but Elias remained ambivalent. When asked ‘What do you think of the return to nudity?’, he answered: ‘It is obviously a sign of the growth of female power: a woman who can show her legs and breasts is no longer the property of her father or husband. It is a decisive step. Is it truly a liberation?’ This question is used to demonstrate a detached reservation in his answer: ‘Let’s say that the question remains open’ (Elias 2013b [1974]: 176). A few years before this interview, in 1970 or 1971, when Elias became a regular visitor to Amsterdam, he showed the other side of his ambivalence in a drawing made on a university blackboard and presented as a ‘didactic aid’ (Fig. 1.1): This drawing depicts the relaxation of manners as a decline in self-­ controls. In using it, Elias unwittingly helped me to formulate a correc-

Fig. 1.1  Didactic aid

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Fig. 1.2  Didactic aid with self-regulation

tion to his drawing and to develop the theory of informalisation, for it was the strictness of social codes that was declining, not self-control. In fact, demands on self-regulation were rising (Fig. 1.2). Elias soon adopted the concept ‘informalisation’, first by helping me to write an English version (Wouters 1977) of my original Dutch article (Wouters 1976), and later by crediting me for introducing the concept, as for example in ‘The civilising of parents’ (2008a [1980]: 35–36), in The Loneliness of the Dying (2010a [1979]) and Studies on the Germans has an opening chapter ‘Civilisation and Informalisation’, written in 1978 as a lecture (Elias 2013a [1978]). Even though I believe I heard this term from Elias in one of his lectures, he only partly adopted ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’. As in 1976  in a letter to me, he restricts his discussion of this expression to sports: ‘If players cannot loosen their aggressive impulses sufficiently the game will be boring; if they decontrol too much they break the rules of the game which set very firm limits to their aggressiveness. The same goes for the spectators’ (Elias in Wouters 2007: 231). This restricted use, mainly in relation to sports and other leisure activities, is also found in his new 1986 introduction to Quest for Excitement, in which he writes that a central problem of many sports is how to reconcile ‘the pleasurable de-controlling of human feelings, the full evocation of an enjoyable excitement’ with ‘the maintenance of a set of checks to keep

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the pleasantly de-controlled emotions under control’ (Elias 2008b [1986]: 31).7 His 1978 essay ‘Civilisation and Informalisation’ renders four types of constraints on the plane of whole societies, without discussing anything like ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’. Elias’s discussion heavily emphasises the burden of liberation, the difficulties of more severe constraints on young people increasingly being made individually responsible for doing the right thing. His example is the emancipation from the external social constraints of fixed courtship rituals. A perspective on the pleasures of informalisation and ‘controlled decontrolling’ is almost absent, and as he did in the 1930s when suggesting the presence of ‘precursors of a shift towards the cultivation of new and stricter constraints’, now—about 40 years later—he suggests that ‘the beginnings of the formation of new codes of behaviour, even the beginnings of a form of group control’, although ‘the main burden of shaping life together at any rate now lies on the shoulders of the individuals concerned’ (Elias 2013a [1978]: 40–42).8 In a written text for a lecture in Bremen in 1980, Elias writes about informalisation without using the concept itself. Nevertheless, he demonstrates a long-term perspective on the process of informalisation. The issue is the multi-party parliamentary regime placing high value on things  In 1986, Elias believed not to have used his expression ‘controlled de-controlling of emotional controls’ in any publication before 1986, for in that year, on one of our weekly walks, he told me without further ado that, now that he had published it in Quest for Excitement, I was henceforth obliged to refer to this work when I use it again. I was so bewildered that it took me until our next walk before I could bite back. Then I forced him to the point of realising that it would really have been more appropriate to have provided a note to this expression, indicating that I had made fruitful use of it over many years. He promised to produce such a note at the next opportunity. See Wouters (2007: 230–237). 8  In discussing informalisation in this essay, Elias adds two useful concepts: he distinguishes between the formality–informality span of a society—which concerns the synchronic gradient between formality and informality—and the formality–informality gradient observed in the course of social development, the diachronic gradient of informalisation (2013a [1978]: 32). 7

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that are slowly changing the German military tradition of absolute obedience and aversion to compromise. ‘There is now the search for the middle way, for mediation and compromise,’ he writes, and continues: It is easy to find one’s way in a landscape where there are only proscriptions and prescriptions; it is far more difficult in a landscape where one has to gain through experience a certain sensitivity for how far one can go in a specific situation and how far one must hold back. The strategies of compromise, of tact in putting out feelers as to where one can press forward and where one has to retreat, which are the elementary forms of life under parliamentarism, are certainly still quite some way from gaining a high place in the German scale of values. For that probably a few centuries of growing accustomed to them are required. (2013a [1980]: 407) This process of ‘a few centuries of growing accustomed’ clearly points to a long-term process of habitus formation as it may develop as part of a long-term process of informalisation. Within such a process, Elias only draws attention to the rising social demands on self-regulation. In an earlier section of this 1980 text, he restricts informalisation to the younger generation and its ‘deliberate neglect, perhaps even a certain contempt, for the subtleties of form—for instance in the precise gradation of bows and curtsies—especially in so far as these formalities seem to symbolise differences of power, rank and prestige.’ Here, Elias places a note: ‘The development of this stance has been called “informalisation”’ (2013a [1980]: 391). By calling informalisation a ‘stance’ he takes a further distance. In ‘The Civilising of Parents’, Elias points to ‘waves of informalisation’ and hastens to add that ‘they take place in highly complex societies which demand a very precise regulation of people in their relations with each other in many areas’ (2008a [1980]: 35). He seems fully content to emphasise the ‘very high standard’ of social demands on self-regulation, a similar formulation to 40 years earlier when he commented on the bathing manners of the 1920s: ‘But this change, and with it the whole spread of sports for men and women, presupposes a very high standard of drive control. … It is a relaxation that remains within the framework of a par-

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ticular “civilised” standard of behaviour’ (2012a [1939]: 181). This shows Elias to be persistent in his neglect of the connection between social informalisation and psychic informalisation. That is, he did not recognise how the widening spectrum of socially allowed behavioural and emotional options went hand in hand with a ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’, an ‘emancipation of emotions’ from a relatively blind and strictly regulated superego. As regulations of superego or conscience become less blind or automatic and strict, and become more open to consciousness and conscious decisions, this shift implies a conversion of conscience to consciousness. Elias did not address this side of informalisation. And to the extent he did, it is confined to the domain of leisure. In 1963, for example, when finishing his long manuscript ‘Spontaneity and Self-Consciousness’, which remained unpublished until 2018, Elias shows a clear understanding of new forms of pleasurable excitement such as sociable drinking, jazz, jazz dances, and the Beatles, but he again confines these to the context of leisure: An unplanned civilising process has left us with an heritage of built-in self-­controls, partly conscious, partly automatic, which are deceptively even and strong, which are, compared with those of earlier ages, more deeply and inescapably internalised; it has left us with an unplanned civilised armour containing within its walls the more elementary forces—many powerful impulses of people which, left to themselves, are springs of danger as well as of enjoyment and satisfaction. All our leisure activities procure for us in some sense a temporary relaxation of the often harsh and stifling rule of our civilising armour. It is, whatever one may say, a highly controlled decontrolling, a highly civilised decivilising of human beings’ more spontaneous propensities that leisure activities in societies with a high level of differentiation and integration such as ours produce. (2018 [1960–1963]: 76) Only once in Elias’s complete works do we find the expression ‘emancipation of feelings’. It appears in The Court Society, although its index does not reference it. This index was compiled by Elias himself, and Joop Goudsblom remembers how he had taken this task seriously, from which

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he concludes that Elias probably did not think this expression was important enough to include. This seems to be as telling as the fact that his single use of the term ‘emancipation of feelings’ is in the context of failed attempts at an emancipation of emotions. The people involved had reacted to eighteenth-century court codes becoming stricter and more formal, but they were severely ‘punished by social downfall or at least degradation’ (2006b [1969]: 122–123). They failed, so these counter-­ movements were restricted and temporary. Formalisation processes prevailed, and did so until about the 1880s, when a relaxation of manners and an emancipation of emotions became part of dominant processes of social and psychic informalisation. Elias used the expression ‘emancipation of feelings’ only once, in 1969, never again. He used the concept of ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ twice, most memorably in ‘Civilisation and Psychosomatics’, where he describes what happened in Amsterdam in 1988 after the Dutch football team ‘rose to the top of the hierarchy by beating first its German and then its Russian competitor’ (2009b [1988]: 185–186). However, Elias always used the concept in its restricted ­connotation, that is, restricted to the pleasurable excitement of (spectator) sports and other forms of leisure. He never used it for the psychic informalisation that corresponds to and coincides with the informalisation of social standards in societies as a whole. In addition, his use of the concept and theory of informalisation was largely restricted to one aspect, to underline that demands on self-regulation had not diminished—on the contrary, they had increased. Therefore, Elias did not acknowledge, and probably did not recognise, the importance of social steering codes losing strictness and rigidity while the spectrum of behavioural and emotional options widened, nor did he acknowledge that the civilising process had come to consist of two phases, the long-term phases of formalisation and informalisation, of which he had described only one part (cf. Kilminster 2007: 125–130). As manners and relations between social groups became less rigid and hierarchical, so too did the relations between psychic functions such as drives, emotions, conscience, and consciousness, altogether opening up a larger and more differentiated spectrum of alternatives, and more flowing and flexible connections between social groups and psychic functions. In the course of

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this ‘informalising process’, to paraphrase and contradict Elias, ‘consciousness’ becomes more permeable to drives, and drives become more permeable to ‘consciousness’. In informalising societies, elementary impulses again have easier access to people’s reflections (Wouters 2007). At the time of writing his book on the process of civilisation, Elias was not able to perceive this and several other characteristics of informalisation. This led him to attribute characteristics of the very long-term formalising phase to the entire civilising process that had also come to comprise a long-term informalising phase: What is decisive for a human being as he or she appears before us is neither the ‘id’ alone, nor the ‘ego’ or ‘superego’ alone, but always the relationship between various sets of psychic functions, partly conflicting and partly co-­operating levels in self-steering. It is these relationships within individual people between the drives and affects that are controlled and the socially instilled agencies that control them, whose structure changes in the course of a civilising process, in accordance with the changing structure of the relationships between individual human beings, in society at large. In the course of this process, to put it briefly and all too simply, ‘consciousness’ becomes less permeable by drives, and drives become less permeable by ‘consciousness’. In simpler societies elementary impulses, however transformed, have an easier access to people’s reflections. In the course of a civilising process the compartmentalisation of these self-steering functions, though in no way absolute, becomes more pronounced. (2012a [1939]: 452) In the long-term phase of informalising, however, the latter process was reversed: this compartmentalisation diminished. Social emancipation and integration demanded psychic emancipation and integration, a more strongly ego- or I-dominated self-steering. This kind of self-regulation implies that drives, impulses, and emotions have become more easily accessible, while their control is less strongly based upon an authoritative conscience, functioning more or less automatically as a ‘second nature’ (Wouters 2007: 202). To conclude, Elias only partially accepted and integrated informalisation in his theory, thus demarcating a significant theoretical difference concerning the direction of civilising processes. Although

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confronted with the theory of social and psychic informalisation, Elias found ways to stick to his original interpretation as formulated in part four of On the Process of Civilisation: ‘Overview: towards a theory of civilising processes’. All these formulations can be found in section five of this overview, ‘The muting of drives: psychologisation and rationalisation’, and none can be found in section three: ‘Diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties’. This omission is significant, as I had already observed in the 1976 Dutch article in which I introduce the concept and theory of informalisation, because many developments lumped together as ‘informalisation’ can also be interpreted and explained as ‘increasing varieties’. Elias, however, refrains from doing so; he dedicates this whole section to ‘diminishing contrasts’ and leaves the notion of ‘increasing varieties’ entirely undeveloped. He therefore left a gap in his theory of civilising processes. At the end of my 1976 article ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’, I highlight this gap: ‘The theoretical addition presented in this article, amounts to a more solid integration of this notion [of ‘increasing varieties’] into the theory of civilising processes as a whole’ (Wouters 1976: 354–355). Whereas Elias continued to emphasise that the ‘relaxation’ of manners remained ‘within the framework of a particular “civilised” standard of behaviour’, most people at the time described the ‘relaxation’ as increased ‘permissiveness’, thus emphasising rising behavioural options or varieties. I meant to do justice to both increasing options as well as rising demands on the self-steering capacity of individuals by introducing the concept of informalisation.

1.5 Informalisation and the Transformation Known as the Renaissance When searching for another transformation of similar magnitude that would lend itself to comparison to the phase of informalisation of social steering codes under discussion here, the Renaissance first came to mind. I thought it would not be difficult to show how this was also an overall transformation in social and psychic processes over a long-lasting period

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(longue durée), involving major shifts in power balances in the direction of court- and state-controlled establishments (Elias 2009a: 107), coinciding with broad waves of individualisation, rising levels of reflection, detachment, and consciousness, and with widening circles of identification. These waves first spread in established groups at courts and the circles connected to them, and from there to broader and broader social classes. The metaphor of a spiral staircase has been used by Elias not only to describe the advance of self-detachment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also to compare them with the present. People ascend from one floor of a tower to the next from where they could overlook the countryside from a higher perspective, as well as being able to look down and, as it were, observe themselves on the lower level from which they had ascended, but they had not yet climbed high enough to observe themselves as people observing themselves. Elias winds up this comparison by stating: ‘This is the further climb that we are making at present’ (2006b: 263). It is ‘the ascent to the next level of consciousness—on which […] one comes to understand oneself in one’s armour and the nature of this armour as it has come into being on the preceding level’ (2006b: 268). A comparison of both transitions, the Renaissance and the present one of informalisation, would show the extent to which the examples I have presented of the transition from a second-nature type to a third-nature type of personality are also examples of this ‘further climb’. Elias also set an example of looking down to a lower level of the spiral staircase by identifying the nature of this armour in his descriptions of the pervasive Homo clausus image of human beings. He wanted to make others see that, as this armour of detachment was thickening, it was reified and ‘interposed between affective impulses and the objects at which they are directed, in the form of ingrained self-control’. From the Renaissance onwards, he writes, people ‘reify the constraint on the affects, the detachment of emotions … as an actually existing wall between them and the object of their thought’, creating an uncertainty over the nature of ‘reality’ outside, which ‘led Descartes to the conclusion that the only certainty was thought itself ’ (2006b: 269–271). Elias clearly derived his own certainty through experiencing this ‘further climb’ himself.

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The major advance in the development of self-constraint in court societies dovetails with a greater detachment and distance from women at court and also with a rise in their power and with the development of romantic love, possibly from postponing the consummation of love and from ‘a melancholy satisfaction in painful joys’ (Elias 2006b: 261). With regard to children, the development of self-restraints and detachment amalgamated with a spurt in their segregation and a more pointed ambivalence in the perception of children as cute and innocent on the one hand and as wicked and dangerous on the other. Romantic love and innocent children both stem from Renaissance experiences. All this shows how interesting, fruitful, and promising it would be to continue comparing the transformation that is described as the Renaissance with the transformation from formalisation to informalisation as it became dominant from the 1880s onwards. I could simply follow the example set by Elias. Yet my plan to continue and expand this comparison remained unexecuted, not only because the whole project was gigantic enough to be perpetually postponed, but, more importantly, because my enthusiasm for expanding this comparison waned with the realisation that the Renaissance transformation would not be a clear-cut case of a shift in dominance from formalisation to informalisation.9 The longue durée transformation was certainly accompanied by informalising counter-movements such as those connected with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Elias 2006b: 122–123), but the balance of formalisation and informalisation remained dominated by formalisation. Just as there is no absolute beginning or end in civilising processes and each trend in a civilising direction is always accompanied by counter-trends in de-civilising directions, and vice versa, there are no absolutes in formalising and informalising processes, but rather a balance of tensions exists between the two,

 The same view appears in Elias’s observation: ‘In earlier cases, such as the period we call Renaissance, the phase of experimentation with new relational forms and rules merged with a phase of consolidation, under the aegis of established groups which also wished to consolidate their domination’ (2008a: 34; cf. Elias 2006b: 259–264). 9

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with shifts in dominance that in the twentieth century produced a spiral movement towards the re-formalisation of previous informalisation as a dominant trend (Wouters 1986).

1.6 Informalisation and the Necessary Critical Degree of Preceding Formalisation At this point, one may wonder about the constitution of informalisation and ask, for example, if the transformation from the Roman Empire to medieval feudalism can also be understood as informalisation. The short answer is no. This would not be an adequate description of informalisation because the transformation towards feudalism was more like a complete ‘regime change’, a process of disintegration accompanied by decreasing levels of interdependence, mutual identification, and mutually expected self-restraints, leading the whole civilising process and the spiral staircase of consciousness to take a downward turn to a lower level. It was, in short, a de-civilising process (Fletcher 1997; Mennell 1989). From the 1960s onwards, many have expressed negative interpretations of the changes in manners and morals in terms of a de-civilising process. They saw decay, a decline, or a regression of the level of civilisation.10 However, the informalisation of which I speak is a different type of change. It is restricted to the informalisation of previously formalised social codes, to a controlled decontrolling of earlier formalised social controls. A similar inference came from comparing the informalisation of social codes since the 1880s with the ‘informalisation of labour relations’ since the 1980s (Wouters 2007: 221–225). The latter expression surfaced in connection with the regulated deregulation of labour relations in low-­ wage countries, competing for the investments of global, transnational, or multinational corporations. In many cases, this deregulation involved  Sometimes Elias also tended towards a negative interpretation, for example, when he made the ‘didactic drawing’ included above that shows a decline of selfcontrols since the late nineteenth century. 10

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abolition of earlier regulations of the labour market that had served to provide a degree of protection against severe forms of exploitation. Increasingly large areas, eventually called free trade zones or export processing zones, were designated to attract investments from multi- and transnational corporations. Within these areas, workers are explicitly forbidden the right to form unions. Usually, this deregulation was not preceded by a substantial degree of formalisation or regulation, and therefore resulted in the growth of export processing zones, level playing fields (‘level’ does not mean that each player has an equal chance to succeed, only that they all play by the same set of rules: the rules of their commerce) and of a dark sector of ‘sweat shops’ and home industry. Here we are confronted with a major, and important, similarity between the regimes of manners and labour regimes: without a critical degree of preceding formalisation, both forms of ‘informalisation’ tend to take a de-civilising turn, to brutalise relations, and to (re-)establish principles such as ‘greed is good’ and ‘might is right’. Another illustration of the importance of a critical level of formalisation preceding informalisation is to be found in the difficulties faced by newcomers to informalised societies, especially those from more hierarchical societies with lower levels of social integration and control, and correspondingly lower levels of mutual identification and mutually expected self-restraints. Many or even most of these immigrants tend to experience a form of social disorientation, also called ‘culture shock’: their scope of identification will tend to be relatively restricted, and they will not know or recognise the mutual expectations of self-restraint pertaining among the established citizens of the country they have come to live in. From their perspective, these expectations of mutual self-restraint do not apply to them or do so only to a lesser extent. When they must orientate themselves to a code of manners they cannot fully understand, if only because it is not backed up by the kind of external social controls they deem necessary, they are less equipped with the social and psychic instruments and functions deemed necessary in these societies. Thus, they are overburdened, just as the people in poor countries are severely overburdened when struck by an informalisation of economic (labour) relations before the formalising of these relations has established a critical level of taken-for-granted protection.

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1.7 S  ocial and Psychic Integration and Integration Conflicts Both individuals and survival groups need to develop a habitus with a critical level of taken-for-granted social and self-controls before a viable degree of informalisation can proceed. This is because, in processes of formalisation, social steering codes develop and levels of mutually expected self-restraints rise: individual and collective conscience formation builds up to a critical level that allows for increasing ‘permissiveness’, for a growing leniency in codes of manners, for increasing instead of diminishing behavioural and emotional alternatives. It is only from a critical moment in the processes of social integration and formalisation of the regimes of manners and emotions onwards that an informalisation of manners can become a loosening and relaxation of these regimes rather than a coarsening and brutalisation. The arrival of this critical moment depends on the advance to higher levels of social integration and functional democratisation, and it is reached when a relatively high level of self-restraint has come to be taken for granted and is therefore mutually expected, thus providing protection by functioning as part of collective conscience. In other words, the relatively high level of social integration and control that allows for such an informalisation of manners presupposes its psychic counterpart: a corresponding level of psychic integration and an equalisation and opening of psychic relations and functions. It presupposes a collective emancipation of emotions: the rise of more open and flowing connections between (a) the more direct ‘first-nature’ drives, emotions, and impulses, (b) the counter-impulses of conscience or ‘second nature’, and (c) a rising degree of ‘third nature’ consciousness. In many respects, processes of conscience formation can be perceived as processes of psychic formalisation. From this perspective, psychic informalisation is a process in which the rulings of conscience become less rigid, less automatic, allowing for a more conscious, more flexible, and varied repertoire. This process involves a shift towards the more reflexive and flexible self-regulation of a ‘third nature’.

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Around the 1880s, the level of social integration and a corresponding level of taken-for-granted restraint had heightened to allow for an informalisation of manners and for its psychic reflection, a corresponding level of psychic integration. If we see processes of conscience formation largely as processes of psychic formalisation, then psychic informalisation is a process in which the rulings of conscience become less rigid, less automatic, allowing for more conscious, more flexible, and varied applications. In other words, it is a process towards a more reflexive and flexible self-regulation, also involving an emancipation of emotions, and, I repeat, this emancipation consists of increasingly open and flowing connections between (1) the more direct drives, emotions, and impulses, (2) the counter-impulses of conscience or ‘second nature’, and (3) consciousness. Without the development of a critical level of psychic formalisation in a large enough part of the population, psychic informalisation in the sense of a ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ will not be controlled enough and would tend to ‘run wild’. Then, the decontrolling of psychic relations and functions can give free reign to the ‘might’ of drives and emotions, which can be dangerous for oneself as well as for others. Thus, such episodes of decontrolling emotional controls could easily lead to overt expressions of inferiority and superiority feelings, to humiliation and annihilation, to de-civilising part-processes. In societies or groups in which social controls are not directed strongly enough at preventing this, only those who have developed a relatively strong ‘third-nature’ type of self-steering—which may gain strength as the level of social and psychic integration and control rises—are able to prevent it from happening. In confrontations between old established groups and groups of outsiders such as immigrants from countries where power balances are relatively unequal, the strength of the level and spread of ‘third-nature’ type personalities is put to the test. Hans-Peter Waldhoff (1995) has demonstrated extensively how in these clashes, members of the established groups are confronted with the ‘weaknesses’ that go hand in hand with strong forms of inequality. These weaknesses had been removed from their relations to such an extent that they thought they had overcome them (cf. Wouters 1998b). Therefore, they risk ‘flying into

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a rage’ that threatens their existing levels of mutual identification, informalisation, and ‘civilisation’. These confrontations are social and psychic integration conflicts. On the social level, they entail the emancipation and integration of lower classes within nation-states and the integration of rich and poor countries and their inhabitants within continental and global networks. On the psychic level they involve emancipation and integration of ‘lower’ emotions and impulses within personality structures. From this perspective, too, it seems highly relevant to analyse and interpret the emotions connected with longings and triumphs, humiliations and defeats, and focus on the regulation of emotions and impulses connected with the struggle for power, status, and human value, particularly feelings of inferiority and superiority. At this point, however, nearing the end of this chapter, it must suffice to sketch a few significant changes in the social and individual regulation of a specific type of inferiority feelings: shame and guilt. The focus is on broad changes in the meaning and experience of guilt and shame and in the practice of shaming.

1.8 A Shift from Guilt to Shame and Shaming In the 1960s and 1970s, the acceleration in the shift from a second-­ nature towards a third-nature personality involved a different function for, and appreciation of guilt. In comparing the three types of persons that he distinguished—tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-­ directed—Riesman wrote about the inner-directed type: ‘He goes through life less independent than he seems, obeying his inner piloting. Getting off course, whether in response to inner impulses or to the fluctuating voices of contemporaries, may lead to the feeling of guilt’. In contrast, ‘the other-directed person must be able to receive signals from far and near; the sources are many, the changes rapid. (…) As against guilt-and-shame controls, though of course these survive, one prime psychological lever of the other-directed person is a diffuse anxiety’ (1950: 24–25). These words can be read as a harbinger of the widespread attack on guilt and guilt feelings in the 1960s and 1970s, expressed through the

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widely used words ‘guilt trip’ in exclamations like ‘Don’t lay that guilt trip on me!’. Ralph Turner observed that ‘guilt becomes an evil thing. It becomes the impediment to individual autonomy and to an individual sense of worth. Guilt is the invasion of the self by arbitrary and external standards’ (1969: 402). This social movement was mirrored in changing opinions about guilt in criminal law and punishment, as well as in a critique of the attribution of blame as a means of orientation (Benthem van den Bergh 1986), and in the ‘self psychology’ of Kohut (1977). Guilt feelings came to be experienced more strongly as indicative of a conscience-ridden personality make-up and, therefore, as an anxiety to be mastered. They came to be seen as a symbol and a symptom of a commanding and rather automatically functioning conscience. Thus, in fact, guilt was rejected for being an internalised form of shame that functions as a form of rigid self-constraint. In comparison, shame feelings that have been less internalised and which, therefore, function less rigidly and automatically than do guilt feelings, are more strongly experienced as external constraints. They refer more directly to other people and also, of course, to the fact that one’s conscience is at least partly in agreement with these others. This ­perspective opens a window on to the reasons why the shift from a superego-­ dominated personality in the direction of an ego-dominated personality has coincided with a decline in the status of guilt, both as a feeling and as a concept. This trend seems to be a reversal of the direction of development from a shame culture to a guilt culture, as it has been represented in an extensive body of literature, especially in the ‘culture and personality’ school of anthropology, of which Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) is a classic example. In the twentieth century, what appears to be a reversal, a change from a guilt culture to a shame culture, is better understood in terms of the process of informalisation. From this perspective, it is wrong to equate the pattern of shame in what has been described as shame cultures with the pattern of shaming and shame in informalised societies. What is needed is a distinction between two types of shame mechanisms—or better, shaming mechanisms—corresponding to (at least) two types of external constraints (see

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Schröter 1997: 102–104), as well as a distinction between two types of shaming culture.

1.9 T  raditional Shame Cultures, Inner-­ Directed Guilt Cultures, and Other-­ Directed Shame Cultures In traditional shame cultures, shaming is a form of external social control exercised mainly to prevent people from engaging with opportunities to transgress group norms. By doing so, shaming techniques such as the pillory functioned to punish them. Continued shaming processes fuelled these external social controls to become transformed into habitual self-­ controls, resulting in the making of a guilt-ridden second-nature type of personality. In people with this inner-directed type of personality, the shame-fear of being unable to control affects in accordance with the prevailing regimes of manners and emotions was internalised, placed under the authority of a rigorous conscience, and experienced as guilt. Johan Goudsblom has argued that the authorities of state and church were at the cradle of this process. Seen from a developmental sociological perspective, he writes, a process of differentiation has taken place, in the course of which a number of causes for shame were gradually brought under the control of more centralized institutions, the state and the church. Part of the burden of shame was converted into guilt by virtue of those institutions which developed special branches for meting out punishment. Other institutions, especially the family, adjusted to this penal pattern. In society at large, it was the state and the church that created guilt-­generating forms of punishment. In doing so, both state and church have strengthened the processes of conscience formation. The confessional and the courtroom were the material reflections of the effort to replace shaming rituals by more rational forms of accusation, allowing the victims (be they ‘culprits’ or ‘sinners’) the possibility of appeal according to written rules. (2007a: 15)

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From this perspective, in which guilt appears mainly as the product of new forms of shaming, to conceptualise more recent changes as a transformation from a guilt culture to a new shame culture may not seem very illuminating. Yet doing so might add to the meaningfulness of Riesman’s concept ‘other-directedness’. It draws attention to a change in the pattern of self-­ regulation in the direction of less inner-directedness—in the sense of bowing to the rules of a rigorous conscience—and greater awareness of others and of the pressures they exercise or have exercised in the past. For the emancipation of emotions also implied that more and more people increasingly became conscious of emotions that, as a rule in the past, had been either ignored or concealed for fear of parents and others on whom they were dependent. In the informalisation spurt of the 1960s and 1970s, many people discovered that self-restraints of all kinds were in fact constraints by others, or at least based upon such external constraints (Wouters 1990a: 53). Thus, processes of psychologisation and sociologisation were tightly interwoven. As the range of behavioural and emotional alternatives expanded in processes of informalisation, avoiding shame and shaming became increasingly dependent upon the ways in which individuals control and regulate their manners and emotions. Self-regulation increasingly became both the focus and the locus of external social controls. The implied reading of the two shame cultures shows a markedly different balance of controls. The same goes for balances of power and also for two other balances. Whereas the regime of emotions in the old shame culture was characterised by a we–I balance (Elias 2010b [1987]) that is strongly tilted to the side of the we, the we–I balance in the regime of the recent shame culture is strongly tilted to the I. Likewise there is a commensurably strong tilting in the balance of involvement and detachment: emotion regulation in the old shame culture was characterised by relatively low levels of detachment, while the new shame culture has relatively high levels. Yet, no matter how the controlling of shame-fears in new shame cultures of other-directed persons may differ from that of the old shame culture of tradition-directed persons, their concern has remained the same: status degradation, loss of human value, respect, and self-respect. The comparison of old and new forms of shaming and shame cultures reveals a trend towards developing increasingly reflexive and flexible regimes of self-­ regulation, demonstrating a rising level of reflexive ‘civilising’ of social

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and psychic authorities. This development has triggered and strengthened informalisation processes and the rise of a ‘third-nature’ type of personality. If continued, feelings of inferiority and superiority will be further admitted into consciousness, while, at the same time, they come under a stronger, a more comprehensive, more stable and subtle internal (self-) control, one that is sharply scrutinised and thus backed up by external social controls. From the perspective of those for whom reflexive ‘civilising’ of social and psychic functions has not reached this level of internal self-control, this balancing act may seem like dancing on a slippery slope, experienced by some as a daring performance, but by others as a nefarious provocation of sacred principles.

2 Informalisation and Evolution: Four Phases in the Development of Steering Codes

2.1 Preview and Signposts A few years ago, I started to think of the evolution from mammals to hominoids and then Homo sapiens as an example of informalisation, albeit of a very different type. But the project of comparing the informalisation of social and psychic codes with evolutionary informalisation would not only have been a bigger undertaking than the Renaissance project, it would also require facing the difficulties of the ‘evolutionary emergence of social processes from biological processes’ (Quilley 2007: xiii). Nevertheless, in what follows, I will try to present an outline and a rough comparison of these two transitions in dominance from formalisation to informalisation, one at the evolutionary level of speciation and the other at the level of social and psychic developments since the advent of Homo sapiens. Thus, this chapter1 shows how long-term evolutionary and social processes are intertwined by comparing two major transitions in biological and social steering codes, one transition serving as a precondition for the other. The first, and oldest, of these shifts involves the evolutionary tran For earlier versions, see Waldhoff et  al. (2015) and Human Figurations 6/1 2017. 1

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_2

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sition into dominance from the innate and highly fixed genetic steering codes of all forms of life to the more collectively learned steering codes of relatively small numbers of highly developed species, allowing them more steering versatility. In this evolutionary process, the genetic steering codes of hominoids and, subsequently, modern humans were increasingly transmitted less by biological inheritance of steering codes such as innate instincts, drives, reflexes, and automatic responses linked to survival, and more via the social inheritance of collectively learned social codes. Thus, changes in their steering codes widened the range of steering capacity and options available to humanoids and humans. Eventually, with Homo sapiens, it became genetically possible for social codes to become dominant and determine more and more the survival and life chances of themselves and other animals. Here, this transition into dominance is tentatively conceptualised as a shift in the balance of evolutionary formalisation and evolutionary informalisation in favour of the latter—evolutionary formalisation referring to speciation processes and the long-term development in the genetic patterns and steering codes of species, and evolutionary informalisation to the process in which some steering codes of some forms of life lost relative rigidity and gained greater plasticity, allowing for expanding possibilities and options to adjust more flexibly to changing conditions of life. From an evolutionary survival perspective on steering codes, evolutionary informalisation entailed the possibility as well as the necessity for social steering codes to expand. Biological and sociological processes became intertwined to the extent that the biological process of the evolutionary informalisation of steering codes proceeded hand in hand with the sociological process of a formalisation of collectively learned social steering codes, subjecting increasing aspects of behaviour to more and more strict and detailed social regulations such as traditions, customs, habits, ­manners, and laws. The changing balance of evolutionary formalisation and informalisation in the direction of the latter entails transitions in genetic codes, natural selection, and random mutation through which vertebrates, mammals, hominoids, and then modern humans acquired the plasticity and flexibility, empowering the latter to learn languages and other symbols. This was an ‘evolutionary breakthrough’ to higher levels of biological, social, and psychic integration, enabling regimes of manners

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and emotions that facilitated and obliged humans to learn an increasingly large repertoire of behaviour and to transmit increasingly complex learned knowledge as part of ‘love-and-learn processes’ (Elias 2009e; Wouters 2016a). In this long-term process, at increasing levels of differentiation, integration, expansion, and complexity, the balance of formalisation and informalisation of social codes was dominated by a formalisation of these codes until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the second, more recent transition in dominance from formalisation to informalisation occurred. From this moment on, the long-term process of formalisation of social steering codes was followed in dominance by an ongoing process of informalisation, changing rather fixed socially learned codes in the direction of more flexible guidelines. In this way, I will describe and compare evolutionary and social processes by comparing the two subsequent transitions in dominant steering codes from formalisation to informalisation. Since these terms originated from the study of social processes, this comparison will also serve as a test of their applicability to evolutionary processes. As discussed in the introductory chapter, it was my ongoing research into changes in regimes of manners and emotions since the 1870s (Wouters 2004, 2007) that had strengthened my conviction that the importance of this social and psychic transformation in dominance from formalisation to informalisation is underestimated. Certainly in the context of the history of life on earth, but also in relation to the history of humanity, awareness of these two phases is confined to relatively small circles. My subsequent desire to raise its profile resulted in a quest to find and clarify another transformation that carries similar weight and apparently shares similar dynamics. This brought me to the project of comparing two sequential phases in the balance of formalisation and informalisation: first, in the development of innate steering codes, integrating the theory of natural selection and the gene theory of inheritance, and second in the development of collectively learned social codes, integrating the theory of social and psychic civilising processes. This project therefore encompasses a period of time that spans the beginning of life on earth to the present day. My main focus, however, will be the transition in dominance from one phase to the other.

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2.2 T  wo Sequential Long-term Processes of Formalisation and Informalisation From the earliest stages of life on earth, living organisms and species were equipped with relatively simple and fixed innate steering codes and mechanisms regulating their behaviour. Although increasingly detailed and expanding, their innate steering codes allowed only a limited range of flexibility and little or no social learning or consciousness. Learning and consciousness are mentioned together here because most, or even all, collective learning processes probably demand at least a basic form of consciousness. Over about four billion years, before vertebrates, mammals, hominoids, and Homo sapiens developed, the formation of animate structures went towards an increasing variety of different forms of life with rising levels of functional differentiation, integration, and complexity.2 Therefore, this long period in the evolution of forms of life and speciation can be understood as a long-term phase in which evolutionary formalisation prevailed. This phase gradually gave way to the transition from hominoids to Homo sapiens, a development in which innate steering codes lost some of their former dominance to collectively learned social steering codes. This development raises the following question: Did the process of evolution change direction? Indeed, these changes together

 The formative processes of social differentiation and integration were a major focus of most sociological classics of the nineteenth century, particularly Herbert Spencer, whose formula of evolution, as taken from his ‘First Principles’ [1862], has reached the World Wide Web—https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511 693939.021 and http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/Outline_of_ Great_Books_Volume_I/—and is paraphrased in recent books, for example: ‘Evolution proceeds from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiation and integration’ (Rammler 2008: 64). To see societies as an integrative level irreducible to the previous physical, chemical, and biological levels became the general view among biologists such as Julian Huxley, Joseph Needham, and others grouped in the 1940s as the ‘modern synthesis’ in evolutionary theory (see Kilminster 2007; Quilley 2010). 2

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imply that, in the case of humans, there was a change of direction in the process of evolution: evolutionary informalisation came to prevail over evolutionary formalisation. Together with becoming much more socially malleable, people developed levels of collective learning and consciousness that allowed for an emancipation of symbols (Elias 2011), a ‘symbols revolution’ that together with a ‘fire revolution’ (Goudsblom 1992) enlarged the surplus of knowledge and power of humans over their predecessors. Thus, the balance of power between patterns of biological evolutionary steering codes and patterns of socially learned and transmitted steering codes changed in favour of the latter. Evolutionary formalisation is a phase in which all forms of life and their innate steering codes changed towards differentiation, expansion, and specification, but they continued to lead to relatively rigid and fixed behaviours, limited and repetitious to the extent that they did not allow any species enough collective learning for ‘civilisation’ or ‘history’ to develop. The further back one goes into the evolutionary past, the more fixed and limited the biological/genetically inherited nature of organisms and species become: literally encoded by DNA (deoxy ribonucleic acid) molecules. Although these species and their constituent cells are in constant flux, the range of possible changes was limited and did not allow for civilisation and history, or in any case, not appreciably. With humans, however, there is always civilisation and there is always history. People cannot do without civilisation: it is their survival menu. Survival chances depend heavily on learning social codes and mechanisms of self-­regulation. Any such survival menu consists of social codes or models of steering behaviour and regulating emotions. These models may vary and change within the species according to the history and development of a specific social group, yet without social steering codes, people are lost. They would lack control of vital information such as what is dangerous to do or to eat and what is not. In order to survive, humans have to learn these codes, and they have to constrain themselves, each other, and their children to that purpose. And only humans are able to learn these ­steering codes; no other species can (or only to a comparably much lower extent). At a critical moment in this blind process of evolutionary formalisation, driven by natural selection and the random mutation of genes, its

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direction partly changed, but not to the extent of destruction or deformation. On the contrary, it gained viability as the innate steering codes of some of the more developed and complicated forms of living organisms became less fixed and more open to variation and change by collective learning—heralding the arrival of hominoids (about 30 million years ago) and Homo sapiens (up to about 200,000 or 300,000 years ago). There would have been a limited degree of ‘decontrolling of innate steering controls’, together with the formation of an innate capacity to learn to speak, think, plan, and remember. This is the development towards greater plasticity and flexibility of steering capacity facilitated by social learning that has been conceptualised as an evolutionary informalisation of previously formalised innate steering codes and innate means of orientation. In this process, biogenetic codes lost steering power to psycho- and sociogenetic codes. The steering codes and means of orientation of humans came to depend more and more on collectively learned social codes and symbols as means of communication. Figure 2.1 represents the formalisation and informalisation of innate steering codes as phases in evolutionary processes. An ascending line from left to right represents increasing differentiation (variety), integration, and complexity of the forms of life and their (innate) steering codes. This line bifurcates at about the time of the arrival of hominoids, representing increasingly less dominating innate steering codes and their growing plasticity, allowing for collective social learning and an expansion of socially

Fig. 2.1  Steering codes

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inherited steering codes. This bifurcation represents the transition in dominance from evolutionary formalisation to evolutionary informalisation.3 As learned social steering codes gained dominance, these codes became involved in a process of formalisation: they expanded, becoming both more specific and more demanding of self-regulation. During a huge leap across time, this formalisation of social codes continued to be dominant. Counter-movements were restricted and temporary until the second half of the nineteenth century, when an informalisation of social steering codes became dominant, while at the same time, demands on self-­regulation continued to rise. This later bifurcation is depicted in the graph representing the formalisation and informalisation of social codes, as shown in the section ‘Excursus: Norbert Elias and Informalisation’ in Chapter 1. The importance of communication and symbols as instruments of orientation and survival is evident from the biogenetic changes towards an increasingly complicated muscle structure of human faces, which allows a far greater range of expression than any other species: ‘The face evolved into a signalling board’ (Elias 2009e: 155; cf. Schröter 2002). In comparison, the facial muscles of all other species are nowhere near as flexible, and far more rigid and fixed. The articulation and sophistication of facial and throat muscles, needed for speaking, laughing, crying, and other forms of communication via gestures, gesticulations, and sounds, relate to the evolution of inherited codes giving rise to innate equipment for learning various social means of expression such as language and other

 This drawing is homocentric in the sense that it focuses on humans and more or less disregards other animals. However, to include other animals would complicate the graph enormously. It would be quite a challenge to draw a line representing the diminishing of various forms of animal life, a process that went more or less hand in hand with the expanding anthroposphere within the biosphere. The growing domination of humans on earth went hand in hand with the decreasing survival chances of many other forms of life, and sometimes included their extermination by humans. This process became increasingly significant after the domestication of fire and of plants and animals (the agrarian revolution), but particularly after the industrial revolution. 3

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formalised body signals.4 Formalised signals and symbols had significant survival functions for human groups. The ability to learn and remember collectively is at the root of the transformation of direct and rather unarticulated sounds into the symbols of a language. The ability to learn a language must at some point in time have developed into a genetically given possibility. These changes in genetically transmitted equipment strongly underline the survival importance of social communication and its means, and it also shows the high level of functional integration or synthesis that humans have attained in their physical, psychical and social equipment. The change towards a regulation of behaviour and emotions dominated by collectively learned steering codes was two-fold. First, the ability to learn social codes had become genetically given. That is, it had become part of the informalised ‘nature’ of humans, which meant that human babies had acquired a high degree of inborn plasticity. Second, this plasticity in turn meant that babies and children needed to be subjected to external and internal social controls, without which a young child would soon die. Both the ability to and the necessity to learn social and individual steering codes were inherent in the evolutionary informalisation, the change of human ‘nature’ resulting in humans’ dependency on the social regulation of love-and-learn processes. Their ‘first nature’ always involves being subjected to external and internal controls (Elias 2009a). The flexibility that came with the ability of humans to learn to speak, think, plan, and remember was a basic condition for the take-off of human ‘history’ and ‘civilisation’. It was the take-off of a long-term development among humans, a ‘history’ in which the balance of ‘nature and nurture’ changed in favour of nurture. More precisely formulated, changes in the ‘triad of controls’, the three inescapable forms of dependence and control, moved in the direction of higher levels of control by humans over extra-human nature, over each other, and over themselves via self-control. It shows why, in all their variety, the collection of social steering codes of a human survival group can be summarised as its

 Human hands have also developed a muscular system with a far higher level of differentiation and co-ordination than any of the great apes. 4

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c­ivilisation or culture. Changes in these codes go hand in hand with changes in civilisation and history, for example, in the civilisation and history of communicating (languages and other formalised symbols), of organising the use of fire and land (the fire and the agrarian revolutions), and of a great many regime changes such as from the Roman Empire to feudalism, feudalism to court societies, and court societies to nation-states. The transition in dominance from the relatively long-term phase of evolutionary formalisation to a shorter-term phase of informalisation involved the human species being more dependent on socially learned steering codes than on innate codes, and therefore, their greater dependence on learning these codes. In this process, as the possibility of learning to speak, think, plan, and remember developed together with the necessity to do so, innate steering codes and ‘instinctive’ means of orientation lost some of their compelling power over humans. An example is given by Elias when discussing the living conditions of stone-age people, characterised by ‘a higher danger level perpetuating a high affect- and fantasy-level of knowledge and beliefs, and a low level of danger-control thus maintaining exposure to dangers at a high level’: Humans at that stage lived like the wild animals they hunted, always on the alert. They lacked the protection of a specific inborn reaction pattern to dangers. Instead, they had a generalised inborn alarm reaction, putting them into a different gear, ready for strenuous action such as flight or fight. But the actual decision as to what to do, what skeletal muscles to move, had to be taken at the non-automatic cerebral levels, patterned by collective and individual experiences of past dangers stored in the memory. (Elias 2007b: 131) It is from this perspective that the development towards hominoids and Homo sapiens was a partial change in the direction of evolutionary processes: no longer an expansion of innate steering equipment characteristic of the evolutionary formalising process, but rather a reduction, a weakening of the power of genetic structures. Was it a partial evolutionary regression?

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Before hominoids, random mutations in the direction of a weakening of genetic steering codes may have occurred within many species, but they would have had no chance of survival without a corresponding strengthening of their social learning capacity. Nor would the other possibility stand a chance of survival: random mutations providing an increased innate capacity for social learning would remain rather sterile without a corresponding spread of more intense and more durable love-­ and-­learn relationships. With humans, this seems to have been the case: in human babies and children the bioprocess of maturation continuously dovetails with a social process of learning social steering codes. Expanding possibilities for collective learning and consciousness went hand in hand with a weakening of rigid innate codes, thus developing away from the fixed innate codes of their predecessors in the direction of comparably flexible social codes. In sum, humans represent a biological, psychical, and social synthesis of the highest level, a synthesis that came about in an evolutionary process of informalisation. What might appear as an evolutionary regression was in fact an enormous source of power and identity for subsequent generations of humans in relation to other species. As collective learning brought expanding reservoirs of knowledge, social codes based upon them came to prevail over unlearned inherited codes and unlearned ‘spontaneous’ emotions. In addition, social codes came to be based more and more on learned ways of how to control ‘nature’. The regulation and steering of behaviour and emotions occurred increasingly by formalising social codes (and their expansion and articulation) as well as by an increasingly authoritative (and authoritarian) conscience. With it came the domination of the human species over other forms of life on earth: survival and rule of the organised ‘smartest’—the rise in the level of human controls over non-human nature, a rising level of human interdependency, if only because of the growing necessity to organise and communicate, and rising levels of flexibility and reflectivity as well as rising demands on self-regulation. Together, these changes in the triad of controls propelled the expansion of the anthroposphere within the biosphere (Goudsblom 2002a, b, c). In important ways, the formalisation of social steering codes continued in similar fashion to evolutionary formalisation: in both processes,

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steering codes became increasingly detailed and both entailed expanding levels of differentiation, integration, expansion, and complexity. In this crucial respect, they proceeded hand in hand: the formalisation of social steering codes involved a continuation of what had been an evolutionary informalisation. In the long run, another critical phase of formalisation emerged in which collective learning processes and the development of an expanding body of social steering codes enabled a partial change of direction: more options and greater (conscious) flexibility of behaviour and feeling gradually emerged. As we have seen, expanding levels of functional differentiation, integration, and complexity went hand in hand with rising levels of interdependency and with functional as well as institutional democratisation, eventually allowing for the flexibility, knowledge (learning), and consciousness that were of critical importance for the relatively recent upswing to dominance of an informalisation of social and psychic codes. As noted in the previous chapter, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, many people interpreted the transition in dominance from the formalisation of social codes to their informalisation as a weakening of ‘civilisation’: they saw the partial change of direction in formalisation processes as a weakening of social codes and controls, and in that sense as a regression, not an evolutionary regression, of course, but a regression of social and psychic steering codes, and sometimes even of steering capacities. A related similarity is that they did not consider this partial change of direction from formalisation to informalisation as an expansion and a further differentiation of social codes. Nor did they see how social controls became increasingly focused on self-controls, thus maintaining the conditions for the advanced flexibility and reflexivity of social and psychic informalisation. My research findings (2004, 2007) suggest that, in the phase of informalisation of social codes, what was initially seen as relative weakness was again and again transformed into the strength of an advance in consciousness, in ‘presence of mind’, in flexibility, and in the ability to live up to rising demands on self-regulation. These demands emerged as relatively fixed and rigid social codes turned into yielding guidelines for choosing from a widening spectrum of behavioural and emotional options. Here

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we find another similarity with evolutionary informalisation: this transformation also demanded from hominoids and Homo sapiens the strength of an advanced consciousness, ‘presence of mind’, and flexibility. In addition, as rather fixed innate codes lost their dominance to the social control of collectively learned social codes, hominoids and humans also had to live up to rising demands of self-regulation. So far, I have outlined how the transition of both the evolutionary and social formalisation into an informalisation of biogenetic codes, psychoand sociogenetic codes is related to the rise of biological, social, and psychic differentiation and integration (and to the connected rise of survival chances) to critical levels of magnitude. Over the past 150 years, approximately, a social process of informalisation has occurred that bears striking similarities with what has happened earlier on at an evolutionary (biological) level.

2.3 T  wo Transitions from Formalisation to Informalisation: A Theoretical Comparison An important similarity of both transitions from formalisation to informalisation seems to be that the ‘synthesis of parts on many levels, through division of functions’ (Elias 2007a, 188) had advanced to a critical level. In both transitions, a critically advanced level of differentiation and integration of (survival) units and of interdependency networks expanding in size and density was necessary, before the involved steering regimes—of innate steering mechanisms and of social and psychical regimes of manners and emotions—allowed for informalisation to become dominant. This advancing synthesis of part-units functioning on advancing levels of integration seems to be of crucial importance for both moments of transition. As already explained, the evolution of animalic life first proceeded towards an expansion of genetic equipment in the form of rather fixed innate behavioural patterns until this expansion/growth in hominoids and then humans reached (1) a critical level of functional differentiation

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and integration5 and (2) a critical level of survival chances: of the levels of material security and physical safety. Combined, these two elements provoked a twist in the process: first in hominoids and continued in modern humans, innate steering codes lost some rigidity and gained plasticity and complexity, eventually allowing for expanding possibilities and options to adjust more flexibly to changing conditions of life. In this process, the emancipation of symbols and the domestication of fire (Goudsblom 1992) were of major importance. Control over fire went hand in hand with the ability to eat cooked food, which was probably instrumental in the development of shorter intestines and walking upright (Wrangham 2010). Fire control made humans less dependent on the alterations of day and night, seasonal changes, wet and cold. Moreover, ‘heating, lighting and cooking all contributed to what we would now call a higher standard of living’ and ‘provides us with an excellent example of how new forms of behaviour may change the balance of power—in this case between humans and all other animals’ and how the latter: could engender changes in habitus, both among the humans who gained greater self-confidence from the presence of fire in their groups and among animals that might be bigger and stronger than humans but had learned to respect and fear their agility with fire. (Goudsblom 2002a: 29–30) From this perspective, it seems quite probable that the emancipation of symbols and the domestication of fire, both for its use as a weapon and as an instrument in the production (forging) of increasingly efficient weapons, have proceeded as twin processes over the same period of time. Two similar part-processes occurred in the informalisation process of social codes, which became dominant in the richer countries of the West from around 1880 onwards: (1) the level of functional differentiation and

 ‘Growing differentiation and a growing capacity for co-ordination and integration are complementary processes in the bio-organisation. Neither of them can advance from one phase to the next if the other does not keep pace’ (Elias 2007a [1979]: 231–232). 5

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integration—in this case: social and psychic integration—reached a critical density and complexity, which coincided with (2) reaching critical levels of material security and physical safety: survival chances. There was an unparalleled rise in the standard of living and in expectations, trust, confidence, and self-confidence, propelling increasing numbers of people to break with old codes and prevailing traditions. The trend towards further expansion and specification of codes and patterns for steering behaviour and emotions gave way and lost its dominance to the trend of increasingly flexible and reflexive regimes of manners and emotions. Firmly rooted traditions were uprooted, but on the whole in ways that can be characterised as ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’. They turned out to be spurts in informalising and civilising processes. Apparently, a critical level of taken-for-granted social controls and self-­ controls and a habitus of self-confidence that develops with material security, social safety, and trust were other necessary conditions for this informalisation to proceed. In other words, in comparing the two transitions, similar process drivers come into view: both transitions seem to be dependent on extensive and intensive growth6—growth in functional differentiation, integration, and complexity, and on reaching the threshold condition of critical levels of material security and physical safety. In pre-human evolutionary processes, this growth involved all living organisms and species, based on natural selection, gene transmission, and gene mutations, and also ongoing differentiation and integration, or, in other words, growing competition and interweaving. In the developmental sequence from vertebrates to mammals, hominoids to Homo sapiens, the ongoing process comes to depend increasingly on transmission and innovation of learned knowledge with the help of symbols, particularly linguistic symbols. On the whole, however, the process of an advancing synthesis of part-units functioning on advancing levels of integration was predominantly blind. Although social processes have directions, writes Elias, ‘they, like nature, have neither purposes nor goals. Purposes and goals may possibly be

 ‘Key words for extensive growth: more and more, further and further. The key term for intensive growth is “greater complexity”’ (Goudsblom 2002c: 403). 6

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achieved by human beings if, as humanity, they agree on them one day’ (2009c: 8). The survival of evolutionary informalising ‘mutations’ (in the direction of greater plasticity or relatively less fixed and more flexible innate steering codes) needed a critical level of dovetailing between the increase of learning potential and the decline of innate fixedness. As steering codes diminished in rigidity, evolutionary informalisation coincided with a relative weakening of the condition of newborn human babies. Compared to (other) newly born animals, human dependence on love-and-learn relationships and processes are both stronger and longer lasting, and so their relative weakness is converted into strength and an advantage in consciousness and manoeuvrability. A similar change can be said to have occurred in the informalisation of social codes. These changes also entailed strong pressures towards a major increase in flexibility and for levels of consciousness to rise to the next step on the spiral staircase of consciousness. On the level of humans, the change from formal and rather fixed steering mechanisms to more flexible and therefore informal ones was also a ‘relational turn’ in the sense that steering came to depend less upon inner or internalised codes, whether genetically or socially inherited, and more upon the (type of ) relations. In Riesman’s terms, there was a transition from inner-directed to other-directed personalities and steering codes. Both evolutionary and social processes of growing differentiation, integration, complexity, and formalisation were spurred by survival struggles and elimination contests in which ‘fewer and fewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will be eliminated from the competition’. As a rule, elimination from the competition coincides with an interweaving of increasingly large (survival) units, a ‘competition and intertwining’ mechanism, also known as ‘the monopoly mechanism’ (Elias 2012a: 301, 303). In the process, many or even all traces of the eliminated units disappear and enter oblivion: ‘In retrospect, people frequently see only the apparently smooth progress of technology, and not the elimination struggles behind it, which consume human beings’ (Elias 2009c: 8). So far, my comparison of the two phases of formalisation and informalisation in evolutionary processes and in human social processes has

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pointed to a complex of interrelated conditions for the two transitions in dominance from one phase to the other to occur, and to a comparable complex of process drivers. Their similar dynamics emphasises the extent to which both processes are ‘blind’, proceeding independently of the wishes and aims of all groups and individuals involved.7 Attempts at understanding this similarity may instigate a rise in the level of detachment and a greater awareness of how closely processes of social and psychic integration are interwoven with those of social and psychic informalisation. In addition to the evidence presented earlier in this chapter, Abram de Swaan has demonstrated the importance of this transition with the use of other examples. In his study of ‘killing compartments’, he observed that the spread of the conditions that enabled the Nazi concentration and extermination camps was in fact incompatible with informalisation, a process akin to what De Swaan characterised as a ‘shift from relational and emotional management through command to a management through negotiation’ (2001: 270). Formalised societies such as Nazi Germany tend to foster strong and inflexible types of social and self-­ control that are relatively rigid: Very elaborate codes of conduct and expression will be maintained to the smallest detail, until the moment that one steps over the threshold and into the compartment of barbarity, where all cruelty and wildness are permitted, until one leaves this reservation again and resumes one’s controlled demeanour, as if nothing had ever happened. (de Swaan 2001: ibid., original emphasis) Since the long-term dominance of the process of formalisation was subdued by one of informalisation, subsequent spurts of social and psychic informalisation have increasingly prevented the very conditions for these forms of social and psychic compartmentalisation to spread. The existence of a compartment of cruelty and fury demonstrates the absence of  This ‘blindness’ also helps explain why the significance of the transition in social steering codes has remained generally unacknowledged. See also Chapter 1, p. 4–5. 7

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a standard of controls with ‘greater evenness and all-roundness in all, not only in some situations’ and ‘removed from extremes’ (Elias in Wouters 2007: 232–233). This means that only from a certain level onwards in the expansion and density of interdependency networks do social controls and steering codes exclude compartmentalisation as a social and psychic defence mechanism. It also helps to understand how closely processes of social and psychic integration are interwoven with those of social and psychic informalisation, together with controlled decontrolling of emotional controls and the emancipation of emotions. Nowadays, the strength of social informalisation and its ‘third-nature’ habitus is put to the test in confrontations within nation-states between established groups and groups of outsiders such as immigrants from countries where power balances are relatively unequal, as discussed in the previous chapter. It is also tested in confrontations between nation-states, particularly between old established ones and rising outsider nation-­ states. In many old established nation-states, another source of confrontations stems from a rise in social inequalities resulting from a relative weakening of the power of politicians and their political centres in comparison to the power of those who are organised and represented in increasingly global monetary organisations and centres. The power of the latter is easily and rapidly expanding beyond state borders and state regulations, whereas political power is still being largely restricted to nation-­ states. These are integration gaps and integration conflicts. From the possible outcome of these and other integration conflicts such as those between humans and non-human nature, many possible futures arise. Johan Goudsblom writes: ‘In 1987 Elias mentioned three possible futures for humankind: a nuclear war; world hegemony by one state; a world-­ wide federation of states.’ And he continues: ‘These possibilities do not rule each other out; we can even imagine a succession in time’.8 Much will depend on the spread and the levels of functional differentiation, integration, and complexity of human survival groups. In addition, their level of informalisation will make a crucial difference.  Quoted from Goudsblom’s ‘thirteen propositions about possible futures’, formulated for the Leicester College Court Conference ‘From the Past to the Present and Towards Possible Futures’, 20–22 June 2014. 8

3 Informalisation and Emancipation of Lust and Love: Integration of Sexualisation and Eroticisation since the 1880s

3.1 Preview In this chapter I examine changes in romantic and sexual relations of young people in relation to the emancipation of women and young people since the 1880s, a point when social codes dominating the relations between women and men, girls and boys, parents and children, changed towards greater leniency, as part of processes of informalisation. What follows is a sketch of how young people and women have successfully escaped from under the wings of parents, men, and husbands, and how this has coincided with an emancipation of their sexuality. As individuals and collectively, women and young people increasingly became sexual objects as well as sexual subjects: in processes of trial and error, they increasingly learned to cope with sexual longings, both with those of others directed towards themselves and with their own. As part of these processes, they directed themselves both to established codes and to their internalised codes about how to connect and integrate sex and love—that is, to connect sexual and relational intimacy. These codes were changing as women and young people

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became emancipated, thus propelling subsequent attempts at finding a more gratifying and enduring lust balance between sexual pleasure and relational fulfilment. These changes manifested themselves in subsequent spurts of sexualisation and eroticisation. This chapter sketches significant moments in these processes and ultimately raises the question ‘Where are we now?’ A tentative answer to this question is attempted as a theory about why love has become more difficult, lasting love in particular.

3.2 Formalisation and Informalisation1 What people know about life and how to live it—that is, our knowledge and our codes of behaviour and feeling—is taught and appropriated in ‘love-and-learn relationships’ and in ‘love-and-learn’ processes. These concepts, coined by Norbert Elias (2009e [1987]), implicitly recognise that for understanding the history of humanity at large as well as the history of any particular society and every individual human being, the history of love is as important as the history of learning. The two are closely connected, ever since the advent of Homo sapiens, when social codes came to dominate genetic codes as steering mechanisms for survival. Since then, human offspring have needed to be adjusted to the prevalent social codes and initiated into the reservoir of social knowledge. Both individual learning and transmitting collective knowledge over subsequent generations depend upon the cohesive strength and warmth of their bonds, particularly those involving children. The fundamental importance of human love-and-learn relations and processes is mirrored in their fears and anxieties:

 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Human Figurations 5 (1) 2016. This version is based upon previous research published in English (2004, 2007, and 2010) and in Dutch (2012). The latter is a monograph largely based upon Dutch sexology studies, which implies an emphasis on processes in the Netherlands, but I think and hope the sequence and details are useful for international comparisons and the general line of these developments is recognisable all over the wealthy West. 1

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Genetically, the whole family tree of fears and anxieties seems to have a twofold root: the fear of physical extinction and the fear of loss of love. Threats to one’s life and one’s love in a very elementary form seem to be the original danger situations. (Elias 2009a: 140) In turn, the structure of people’s fears and anxieties as well as the qualities of their bonds of love depend upon the levels of social organisation, pacification, and civilisation in and between their societies: ‘they are always determined, finally, by the history and the actual structure of his or her relations to other people, by the structure of society; and they change with it’ (Elias 2012a: 485). In expanding networks of human interdependence, from the ‘fire regime’—the social organisation of controlling fire—to the agrarian regime and the industrial regime, the levels of differentiation, integration, and complexity have risen together with rising social controls of people over each other and themselves (Goudsblom 1992). As human groups expanded, differentiated, and became increasingly complex, the same happened with their codes of behaviour and their collective stock of knowledge: both also expanded and differentiated, becoming more detailed and complex, thus demanding higher levels of self-regulation for keeping people from transgressing the prevailing steering codes. On the whole, this trend towards higher levels of ‘social constraints toward self-­ constraint’ was documented from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century in Elias’s book On the Process of Civilisation (Elias 2012a [1939]). It was a long-term process of formalisation of social codes. Around the 1880s, unplanned social processes of differentiation, integration, and growing complexity, together with their inherent social constraints towards self-constraint, had apparently reached a critical level that allowed for—and soon also demanded—a partial breakthrough in the formalisation process. Fixed rules of behaviour and their demand for unthinking obedience to social superiors lost some of their function in maintaining social organisations and even tended to become counterproductive. Increasingly, as old rigid social controls loosened up, formalisation lost its dominance to a process of informalisation (Wouters 2007, Chapters 1 and 2 of this book). A rapidly increasing variety of relations and situations in

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complex networks of interdependency came to demand larger degrees of ­fine-­tuning and this implied manoeuvring in increasingly flexible and ­sensitive ways according to more flexible guidelines, thus opening up a wider range of acceptable behavioural options. The choice among options, however, did not make behaviour easier, because making the right choices among a complex multitude of options came to depend on social skills that could no longer be learned on the basis of simply being obedient to authorities and fixed rules. It demanded the capacity to attune oneself to (changes in) the specific parameters of each particular relation and situation. These demands coincided with rising empathy, together with openness, ‘ease’, and reflexive caution. People were increasingly drawn into the social competition of learning these necessary social skills and performing them with ‘ease’. This competition intensified in the course of following decades and spread from circles of calculating politicians and commercial entrepreneurs to the much wider circles of calculating citizens. In this competition, the ‘personality capital’ of a habitus that allows for more sensitive and flexible, subtler behaviour turned into a national habitus, and more or less simultaneously, into the international habitus of the wealthy West. As a whole, the transition in dominance from formalisation to informalisation also involved growing demands upon the more intimate and private relations such as between children and parents, and the romantic, erotic, and sexual relations between women and men.

3.3 Informalisation in Relations Between Parents and Children Continued informalisation processes involved a growing dependence of children upon the ability and necessity of learning the related skills of reflexivity and flexibility. It implied growing demands on love-and-learn relations and therefore growing interdependence of parents and children through which their relationships have gained depth and warmth as well as importance and intimacy over a longer period of time: both parent-

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hood and childhood were prolonged (see Röling 2006: 24, 26). These transformations were captured in the expression ‘century of the child’. Particularly in that century, the emancipation of children and teenagers in relation to parents and their representatives—and of women in relation to men—clearly implied rising levels of equality as well as of intimacy. Since about the 1880s, the traditional emphasis in child rearing, which emphasised subservience to institutional and adult authority sanctioned by corporal and other punishments, shifted to an emphasis on qualities linked to the self-regulation of children, sanctioned by reasoning and differentiations in affective warmth and permissiveness. Relations between children and parents gained intimacy and warmth as well as sensitivity and reflexive thoughtfulness. After the Second World War, the level of parental investment in their children was again rapidly rising, a process that coincided with widening circles of identification, ranging from animals, women, and children to such groups as Indians and Negroes, now known as native Americans and blacks. Emotional investment in love-­and-­learn relations accelerated particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when this trend was backed up by rising levels of material security and physical safety, allowing for the spread of a warmer and more intimate, flexible, and cautious form of parental control on the self-control of children. Thus, more and more children in warmer and more intimate family relations have experienced a type of discipline or social control that is less directed at obedience than towards selfcontrol and self-steering—that is, towards learning to think and decide for themselves (cf. Alwin 1988). Simultaneously, having and raising children became increasingly important for providing an unthinking sense of belonging and a source of motivation in life, whereas religion and political ideology, even social class, gender, and nationality lost much of that capacity. For increasing numbers of people, the love-and-learn relations with their children became a major provider of meaning in their life and their strongest motivating power. In raising children, a warmer and more intimate, flexible, and cautious parental control over the self-control of children spread and became known as ‘love-oriented discipline’ (Bronfenbrenner 1958).

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3.4 Gender and Sex: The Lust Balance The general trend towards rising empathy, openness, and reflexive caution in relations pertains particularly to relations involving sexuality. The emancipation of women and young people went hand in hand with an emancipation of their sexuality; and, at the same time, parents—of different social classes to varying degrees—came to take more account of the interests and feelings of their children, and also more account of the sexuality of their teenagers. However, it has only been since the Sexual Revolution that women, including young women, have themselves actively taken part in public discussions about their carnal desires and how to achieve a more satisfactory lust balance—the balance between longings for sexual gratification and for enduring relational intimacy. From then on, more and more people have been experimenting in their relationships between the extremes of desexualised love (sexual longing subordinated to the continuation of a relationship) and depersonalised sexual contact and the extremes of being a sexual object and a sexual subject. This experimentation process provoked many new and more varied answers to what might be called the lust-balance question: when and within what kinds of relationship(s) are (what kinds of ) eroticism and sexuality allowed and desired? From the 1960s onwards, topics and practices such as premarital sex, sexual variations beyond the missionary position, unmarried cohabitation, adultery, fornication, extramarital affairs, jealousy, homosexuality, pornography, teenage sex, abortion, exchange of partners, paedophilia, incest, and so on—all part of a wider process of sexualisation—implied repeated uprooting confrontations with the traditional lust balance. People were confronted with the lust-balance question more frequently and intensely than ever before. This question is first raised in puberty or adolescence, when bodily and erotic impulses and emotions that were forbidden from early childhood onwards (except in cases of incest and paedophilia) are again explored and experimented with. The original need of small children for bodily contact and their subsequent frank and spontaneous explorations remain, without being reciprocated (Fonagy 2008), and they are restricted and

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stopped when adults begin to experience them as sexual. Sexuality and corporality are thus set apart from other forms of contact and compartmentalised. In puberty and adolescence, when teenagers’ longings and demands for intimacy and confidentiality are already quite developed, the taboo on touching and bodily contact has to be gradually dismantled. More or less overcome by their new longing for sexual pleasure and gratification, young people have to integrate this longing into both their personality and their relations. They have to learn how to become a sexual subject and a sexual object and to find a balance between the two. For most, this is a process of trial and error. In the process of sexualisation and eroticisation, especially since the Sexual Revolution, women collectively have come into a position similar to that of young people when becoming sexually mature: both entered the trial-and-error process of becoming more of a sexual subject.

3.5 T  rial and Error as Collective Processes: Sexualisation and Eroticisation In the twentieth century, especially since the 1960s, this process of trial and error has been going on collectively. Allowing for differences in nationality and social class, the subsequent moments of collective learning processes determined to a large extent the range of available options with which individuals living in each moment saw themselves confronted. Since the 1880s, over decades in which women emancipated, men adjusted to that, and young people continued to escape from under their parents’ wings, this range has widened considerably. Until the 1960s, however, a highly uneven balance of power between men and women, together with a highly compartmentalised sexuality, ensured that a woman’s carnal desires and experiences remained unmentionable. It made for sexual relations that did not demand much relational or personal intimacy, even between husband and wife. This is typical of a lust balance in which the longing for sex and the longing for enduring relational intimacy are not strongly integrated, can even be highly segregated.

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This view of widening options and a collective process of trial and error seems in conflict with the fact that, in most Western countries, the old rule of sexual abstinence before marriage was formally maintained up to the 1960s. However, this impression of conflict is wrong, because increasingly people just paid lip service—they did not live up to this rule and practised the policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. Dutch research shows that young people of the generation born at the beginning of the twentieth century postponed their first coitus on average until ten years after becoming sexually mature. The generation of about 1935 waited seven years, an average decline of ten months per ten years. This downward trend continued, for the generation of 1970 waited five years, which was a decline of seven months per ten years. Apparently, this decline was at a slower pace than that of the generations before the Second World War (Vliet 1990: 56). And although ‘the pill’ did of course allow for more, and more varied, sexuality and for greater emotional tranquillity in seeking sexual pleasure, these findings nevertheless seem to suggest that the Sexual Revolution was not as revolutionary in terms of crucial aspects of sexual behaviour such as the age of first sexual intercourse as it was for opening the public debate on sexuality and of ending the hypocrisy of formally upholding the ban on premarital sexuality. However, as the balance of power between women and men, as well as between parents and children, became less uneven, possibilities for more frank and warm intimate relations increased—as did the necessity of developing such relations. For men, the change was mainly towards an ‘eroticisation or sensualisation of sex’. Male sexual pleasure came to depend more strongly upon the sensual or erotic bond with the sex partner, that is, upon relational intimacy. They also came to experience women not mainly as sexual objects but also more as sexual subjects. For women, the change was towards a ‘sexualisation of love’ and becoming a sexual subject as well as a sexual object. Together, these changes made for a single integrated process of sexualisation and eroticisation that permeated across the board of social life, private as well as public. As the part-­ process of sexualisation attracts much more attention, and because it also repeatedly provokes moral indignation, the significance of the part-­ process of eroticisation is often only partly acknowledged.

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3.6 T  rial and Error Before the 1960s: Two Social Class Trajectories Until the 1960s, the trial-and-error process towards easier and more comradely relations between women and men had many trajectories, but at least two that are differentiated by social class. One trajectory involves ‘good society’ [gute Gesellschaft] and groups of families for whom it largely served as a model. In the 1880s, young people from these social classes had limited opportunities to select a marriage partner—courtship activities being strictly controlled by parents. An example is dancing, which was held in high esteem as a courting arena. Only at a private ball or dinner dance could a young man dance with a girl of his social class. But first he had to ask her parents for permission, and when he was listed in her dancing programme he might opt for a second dance with the same girl—but opting for a third dance would create expectations and obligations, directly connected to getting engaged and then married. This scene changed as young women went out to work in such places as offices, libraries, hospitals, and schools, and aimed at financial independence. In addition, sports and bicycles and the dance craze of the 1920s opened up less cramped opportunities for meeting. Young people were allowed increasingly to visit public dancing places and to organise private dance parties only for themselves. In the Netherlands, the informalisation of courtship activities and engagements in good society also entailed an erosion of this public pledge to marry and a trend towards young people more easily breaking off their engagements. From the 1920s onwards, this more easy-going attitude is documented in Dutch manners books by increasing complaints about young people more casually breaking off their engagements, as well as by advice, based on this change, that the announcement of an engagement be scaled down to a relatively small gathering, rather than being the big ceremonious occasion with a formal and public pledge to marry that an engagement used to be (Wouters 2004). In the social classes where young daughters would usually work as domestic servants, salesgirls or in workshops, the codes of ‘good society’ hardly functioned as a model, and parents traditionally allowed their ­offspring to

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attend meeting (and mating) occasions like fairgrounds or to stroll along promenades. Couples would form, and many a marriage was arranged after a young woman got pregnant (van Hessen 1964). In their marriages, most husbands and wives followed traditional patterns of married life: strongly embedded in larger we-groups of families and characterised by a division of tasks and worlds between husbands and wives that in effect largely excluded confidentiality and relational intimacy (Straver et  al. 1994). These traditions ruled in most villages and working-class neighbourhoods.

3.7 New Practices and New Concepts The trend in the direction of young people escaping from under their parental wings and experimenting with erotic relations on their own can be presented by focusing on new words and practices. An important new practice is indicated by the rise in the 1920s of the Dutch word verkering; it was derived from the verb verkeren, which means ‘to be or move in [this or that] company’. In the 1880s, the word acquired a romantic connotation, particularly when it was transformed into the noun verkering. As such, some people of the middle classes understood it as a romantic relation preceding a formal engagement, while others saw it as ‘trying out’ a relationship that could develop into vaste verkering, a more fixed (=vast) commitment, similar to what became known as ‘going steady’ in English. In Dutch good society, however, people looked down on verkering, both the word and the practice. In their view, it was a disgustingly bad habit among the middle and lower classes, and they continued to perceive an engagement as the only proper arrangement that builds up to marriage. Thus, they tried to ban the practice by banning the word, and would always call their ‘try-out’ an ‘engagement’, even when the couple had never been through a formal engagement ceremony (more details in Wouters 2004, 2014a). A demonstration of the long-lasting power of this ‘good society’ habitus is presented by a psychologist and journalist in her review of my 2012 book: Throughout the twentieth century there was no [Dutch] word for a romantic relationship with sexual implications. A couple could be

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married or engaged, but there was no name for the preceding phase, at least not in manners books giving advice on these thorny problems. The word verkering was used only in the vernacular and just did not apply to people in higher or bourgeois circles. Verkering or vaste verkering was something the kitchen maid had with her soldier. Wouters repeatedly uses the term in his book, perhaps also in an attempt to get it accepted as neutrally descriptive, but for me it is saturated with insufferably petty and chiefly vulgar associations. (Ritsema 2012) Another new practice and neologism of the 1920s is scharrelen (literally: searching or groping movements, like chicken scratching, rummaging), a word used to indicate a relation with a girl for flirting and for fooling about in an affair that was not intended to become a serious love relationship. Girls who indulged in the practice could be called a scharrel and were in danger of being seen as ‘the town bike’ (the literal translation from the Dutch is ‘licked-off sandwich’). A similar negative word was the amatrice (female amateur). From the 1920s to the 1950s, it expressed the moral concern of Dutch upper and middle classes about the morality of girls in the younger generation. The amatrice was defined as ‘the girl who gives herself to a friend in a loosely-­ fixed relationship for which she is rewarded by being taken out often—to be distinguished from the professional prostitute’ (Saal 1950: 62). These girls had sex, which should not happen, and if it did, it should be kept secret or denied—for even the suspicion of indulging in having sex could damage their reputation and respectability and, therefore, their future chances of a good marriage. But when denial became impossible, for example because more and more girls came to visit physicians and clinics with venereal diseases, the word amatrice was invented: The appearance on the scene of the amatrice as a dramatis personae […] is connected to the appearance of a premarital female sexuality that could no longer as a matter of course be localised only within the lower classes nor be lumped automatically under the heading of prostitution. (Mooij 1993: 136)

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This figure of the amatrice evaporated completely in the Sexual Revolution. With the moral stigma removed, the amatrice became a girl with a steady relationship, a ‘normal’ girl who had verkering or vaste verkering. She was, in fact, ‘going steady’. In the second half of the 1930s, parental control over the younger generation had softened to the point that ‘wise parents’ would not think of asking a young man for his ‘intentions’ when he paid a little extra attention to their daughter, ‘not even if he were to take her out frequently’ (quoted in Wouters 2004: 72–73). Parents were advised to give freer rein to their adolescent children by gedogen, conditionally allowing of such a practice, usually combined with a policy of cautious deterrence. In this way they tried to ‘hang on’ by discreet yet distinct attempts at staying ‘in the scene’ with their children, thus maintaining both an intimate bond and a guiding eye. It seems obvious, however, that particularly from the 1920s onwards, the try-out relations of young people, whether called an ‘engagement’ or a verkering, were becoming increasingly ‘sexual’ (details in Wouters 2004, 2012, 2014a).

3.8 P  rocess Continuities in Class Differences Before and After the 1960s The sexualisation of ‘try-out’ relationships was observed in all social classes, it was part of a general trend, and yet some differences between the social classes continued from before the 1960s into later decades; these differences can be conceptualised as process continuities. A significant one is that, in comparison with girls and boys from the middle and upper classes, their young counterparts from lower social classes generally got married at an earlier age. It is one of the traces of a traditional pattern that persisted among them. Another one is that social control over the young is less directed towards teaching them to steer themselves and more towards demanding their obedience in combination with a rather partial supervision and a tacit policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. This policy is directly related to an understanding of the budding sexuality of boys and girls as a ‘natural force’ of ‘raging hormones’ that are bursting to come, and both are highly regarded and status enhancing among those

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who are keen on acquiring sexual experience. Belonging to the same traditional pattern are the findings that these youngsters usually start tentative sexual relations at an earlier age than their contemporaries of higher social classes and that they proceed more quickly from first contact to full intercourse. These and other examples of greater sexual directness are reported in sociological and sexology studies and are discussed in Wouters (2012). Young people from higher social classes report more reserve in developing relational and sexual trajectories. Among them, masturbation is reported more often. On average they are later in starting an intimate (‘try-out’) relationship and also take more time than their counterparts from lower social classes before they get to experience full sex. They are more reticent in getting there because they want to develop a mutual consent that includes ‘being ready’ for the experience. This reticence is most probably related to an upbringing that focuses less on obedience to parents and other authorities and more on learning to decide for oneself. At the same time, increasing parental trust in the self-steering abilities of children has reduced the old fear among parents that their offspring would lack self-control and let themselves go sexually when social control was absent. It seems obvious that these differences between the classes concur with differences in the development of self-steering.

3.9 C  onnecting Sexual and Relational Intimacy: Trial and Error Since the 1960s Despite many fluctuations, accelerations, and counter-currents at many levels of complexity, on the whole, trial-and-error processes went in the direction of a ‘sexualisation of love’ (involving mainly women) and an ‘eroticisation or sensualisation of sex’ (mainly men). Particularly in the collective quest of how to connect sexual with relational intimacy, prominent episodes can be distinguished. Five of these will now follow.2

 Four are more elaborately backed up with data and described in greater detail in Wouters (2004), the fifth one in Wouters (2010a). 2

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The first is the Sexual Revolution. At that time, young people were breaking the taboos of previous generations to such a degree that there was an acceleration in the emancipation of sexual emotions and impulses—allowing them into consciousness and public debate. Women rejected their traditional submissiveness towards male superiority to the extent that it became socially accepted for them to participate in public discussions on sexuality and a more gratifying lust balance. They subjugated their traditional shame and shame-triggered counter-impulses involving lustful and sexual feelings; they stopped answering questions regarding sexuality in a more traditionally conservative way than men; and in the early 1970s, they silenced men who were still complaining about their wife getting an orgasm too slowly by venting complaints about husbands having their orgasm too fast. In a short period of time, the relatively autonomous strength of carnal desire came to be acknowledged and respected. For both genders, sex for the sake of sex changed from a degrading spectre into a tolerable and thus acceptable alternative, allowing more women and men to experiment with sex cheerfully and outside the boundaries of love. At the time, the spirit of liberation from older generations prevailed, and did not allow much attention to be given to the demands of liberation. From the late 1960s onwards, as living together without being married became socially accepted and marriage receded as the only acceptable aim in initiating a trial relationship, the number of people getting formally engaged declined markedly and the word verkering lost much of its function and tended to become obsolete. This trend accelerated in the next decades with the spread of the term ‘having a relationship (with someone)’ to indicate a sexual and romantic relation (for the sake of such a relationship). In one respect, the word ‘relationship’ went through the same development as the word verkeren: it acquired a sexual and romantic ­connotation—in the 1950s (see WNT, the Dutch historical dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlansche Taal)—and over the next decades, this connotation gained strength. The period between 1968 and 1974 was one of rapid major transitions. An indication is that the reported sexual experience of young people in the Netherlands doubled while their attitudes in matters of sexuality became twice to three times more permissive. More important is that in these years a trend in teenage sexuality appeared that would continue

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during subsequent decades until today: the principal conditions for parental consent to their teenagers having sex and also for a romantic and sexual ‘sleepover’ had become: ‘feeling strongly for each other’ and mutual consent about ‘being ready for it’, that is, ready for sex as an exploration of physical, personal, and relational feelings (Wouters 2012). A second remarkable episode in the collective trial-and-error process is in the second half of the 1970s, when women brought about a shift in emphasis from ‘sexual liberation’ (from parental sexual codes) to ‘sexual oppression’ (by men): now, opposition turned against the codes and morals of the dominant sex, against sexual violence, and pornography came to be seen as triggering sexual violence. Around 1980, massive anti-­ pornography demonstrations were held by women, thus clinging to their romantic relational ideal of love. At the same time, however, there were discussions about women who enjoyed only one-night stands, thus excluding sexual intimacy from other forms of intimacy; their longing for relational intimacy had come to be experienced as an obstacle to sexual pleasure. They avoided any emotional commitment in having sex. According to tradition, a woman should have sexual desires and fantasies only within a romantic relationship that was meant to last a lifetime. In a lust balance that is tipped the other way, a woman’s sexuality could be aroused only outside such a relationship, in almost anonymous, instant sex. This compartmentalisation of sexuality or ‘sexual separatism’ (Lasch 1979: 338) clearly showed women to be moving in between the extremes of ‘love without the ballast or duty of sex’ and ‘sex without the ballast of love’. As an undercurrent, this lust balance formed the negative of that propagated by the anti-pornography movement. To a large extent that movement was an ‘emancipation cramp’, expressing problems connected with the emancipation of sexuality, for the attack on male pornography ­concealed as well as it expressed a ‘fear of freedom’ (in Erich Fromm’s famous phrase), a fear of experiencing and presenting oneself as a sexual subject. This fear of an old danger was expressed in the anti-porn movement as well as in sexual separatism, and either way, the opposite sex was seen as the origin as well as the solution of all difficulties. No woman will have been able completely to withdraw from this development and its inherent ambivalence, if only because, before the sexual revolution the social code allowed women to express only one side of the lust balance.

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In some respects, men appeared to be in a similar transition. Sexology studies from the early 1970s indicate, for example, that many married men still reported a preference for keeping an emotional distance from their wife when having sex; this preference for sexual separatism was probably connected with an experience similar to that of women who separated sexual intimacy from other forms of intimacy, because of the experience that emotional intimacy disturbs their sexual appetite. By 1981, however, a sexology study showed that the number of men reporting a preference for an emotional distance when having sex with their wife had strongly declined. Apparently, they no longer wanted her mainly as a sexual object, but also as a sexual subject. In the same period, this shift can also be deduced from a decline in the percentage of men who expressed a strong aversion to giving oral sex (‘eating pussy’). It had dropped from 50 percent in 1971 to 20 percent in 1981 (Vennix 1989). A third prominent moment in the collective trial-and-error process consisted of a lust revival. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the ‘emancipation cramp’ was overcome: a more relational outlook and a (female) ‘lust revival’ surfaced, together with public discussions on such topics as ‘men as sexual objects’, women’s adultery, masturbation; and with the success of groups of male strippers like Chippendales and the launch of ‘female pornography’, the emancipation of female sexuality and the sexualisation of love accelerated again, both among a new generation of young women and among feminists, a leading older one of whom looked back at the anti-pornography movement as a ‘kind of puritanism’ (Meulenbelt 1988). The change among men was again in the direction of experiencing women less as sexual objects, and more also as sexual subjects. In 1989, half of the men reported the practice of giving oral sex as a regular one (Vennix 1989). A comparison of teenagers of the 1980s generation (born in between 1968 and 1972) with what their parents of the 1950s generation (born between 1938 and 1945) reported on their youth (Ravesloot 1997) shows huge changes: teenagers of the 1950s generation were living in strict hierarchical relations in which much was obligatory, little allowed, sex a taboo, and many reported surreptitious attempts to escape this rigid regime, whereas in the 1980s, parents had changed to giving their teen-

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age children the possibility of growing into a sexual human being by allowing them to experiment with ‘try-out’ relationships until one of these proved to be intimate, warm and open enough for the young couple to decide they were ‘ready for it’. The fourth episode in the process of sexualisation and eroticisation was from the late 1980s into the 2000s, when both longings of the lust balance were becoming integrated on a higher level, allowing more sex and expecting more love, which implied that female emancipation was not only expressed in acknowledgement of the principle of mutual consent but that of mutual attraction as well. The traditional observation that girls love boys more than sex and boys love sex more than girls was eroding quickly. During these years there was a love and lust revival. Sexology research of 1990 finds that, particularly after having acquired sexual experience, ‘most young people think of love and sexual pleasure as two sides of the same coin, and that this goes for both boys and girls’ (Vliet 1990: 70–71). Sexologists also report young people in 1990 beginning sexual relations at an earlier age while also postponing marriage and/or having children at a later age, and in this longer in-between period they report a trend towards having more subsequent monogamous ‘try-­out’ relationships, characterised as ‘serial monogamy’ and ‘short fidelity’ (Vliet 1990: 65; Vogels and van der Vliet 1990). The emancipation of female sexuality, and its counterpart, the eroticisation and bonding of male sexuality, were expressed and propelled by literature (such as feminist publications), by protest activities (like those against sexual violence and harassment) and by changes in the law such as making rape in marriage liable to punishment. They were also driven by welfare arrangements providing the material basis for many women to develop an ‘equanimity of the welfare state’ (Stolk and Wouters 1987a). In addition, they were spurred on through men being caught in a pincer movement. They were squeezed between, on the one hand, their longing for an enduring intimacy, becoming subject earlier and more strongly to more or less rigorous limitations such as the likelihood or threat of desertion and divorce; and, on the other hand, their longing to satisfy their own sexuality, becoming increasingly dependent upon their talent for arousing and stimulating a woman’s sexual desires.

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A fifth striking episode in the collective trial-and-error process towards a further integration of love and lust was in the first decade of the twenty-­ first century with the international outbreak of an attack on ‘sexualisation’ and ‘pornification’. At first sight, this attack may give a different impression from that of a continued integration of ‘love and lust’, because both these concepts, pornification in particular, do carry strong negatively loaded moral connotations. On closer inspection, however, these protests predominantly symbolise a new emphasis on the love side of the lust balance, for in comparison with love, sex had become relatively easy. If the old anti-porn movement symbolised an attempt at blending more sex with love, the new one symbolised an attempt at combining more love with sex. The long-term process of sexualisation and eroticisation clearly continued as before in the direction of emancipation of sexuality and certainly not in the direction of the preceding long-term process of desexualisation, in which taboos on sexuality had gained strength. In the Netherlands, the clearest manifestation of the quest for combining more relational intimacy with sexual intimacy was the ‘slow sex’ movement. The people involved in this ‘slow sex’ movement attacked the sex of pornography, seen mainly as mechanical, vulgar, and loveless, but their attack was not so much directed against pornography as it was more an outcry for a higher quality of sex—sex as ‘haute cuisine’—and that quality was sought in the further integration of relational intimacy with sexual intimacy. The most successful outcry was a book entitled in German McSex: Die Pornofizierung unserer Gesellschaft (Hilkens 2010 [original Dutch 2008]). Its author lived a life of chasing sexual gratification until she experienced it as empty; her attack on pornification is predominantly in favour of eroticising sex and, therefore, in favour of a lust balance that further integrates relational and sexual intimacy. The development of young people’s attempts at integrating sexual longings into a personally gratifying and socially acceptable lust balance, however, is still very much in full swing. Continued tensions and shifts in the social definition of what constitutes an ideal lust balance also allow the conclusion that the Sexual Revolution has not ended. Individuals as well as societies still struggle with its ‘aftermath’, as has recently been demonstrated by the confusion, moral fervour, and moral indignation of attacks on ‘sexualisation’ and on paedophiles.

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In 2015, research by HBSC (Health Behaviour in School Children) on 44 western countries, showed that Dutch children rank highest in having good communications with their parents and in feeling that talking with their parents about their problems is possible (Kuntsche et al. 2015). It seems likely, however, that many parents as well as adolescents would like to talk more openly with each other about sex, but they don’t know how, as they are again and again overcome by some kind of confusion, indicating that discussing problems of the lust balance is still quite difficult. They are surrounded by relatively high levels of shame and embarrassment, particularly if discussing personal sexual problems, fears, and desires. Even with their peers, most teenagers find it difficult to talk about their own sexual experiences and longings, but between them and their parents a specific obstacle has developed. That is because (except in cases of incest) it was in this parent–child relationship that parents did not reciprocate or, if they had, eventually stopped reciprocating intimate touching and other physical contact. Instead they came to reject and ignore such contact until even the thought of its possibility had been banned from relation and conversation. At the same time, however, as children grew up, emotional intimacy in this relationship rose to a level at which other relations would have become sexual. This creates a tension that may explain the collective fear and confusion about paedophiles. This explanation is based upon relationships between parents and children becoming increasingly intimate and erotic. As levels of their intimacy were rising, their erotic components tended towards comprising emotions and impulses that were warded off immediately for having an alarming sexual nature. Experienced as extremely ‘dangerous’, they tended to be restrained immediately and almost automatically, thus excluded from consciousness and perceived as ‘not mine’. To the extent that these emotions remained repressed and unacknowledged, they became the kind of ‘blind spots’ of consciousness which, when touched upon—for example when discussing paedophiles and child sexual abuse—give rise to vehement opposition to such emotions and to the people who experience them (see Waldhoff 1995; Wouters 1998a, b). This opposition did not extend to homosexuals (who in the past had been conflated with paedophiles), in the Netherlands, homophobia declined; to give one indication: in 2012, half of young men and a quar-

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ter of young women disapproved of two young men kissing in public. By 2017, this percentage has almost halved to 27 per cent of young men and 13 per cent of young women.

3.10 A  voiding Old Practices and a Quest for New Words In 2005, ‘having strong feelings for each other’ sufficed for 80 per cent of the Dutch school population (representative sample, aged 12 years and older) as a precondition for having sex (de Graaf et al. 2005). The corresponding figure in 1995 was 75 per cent. As both mutual and parental consent became more dependent upon the strength of feelings for each other and the depth of the relationship rather than upon age or anything else, teenagers could feel relatively free to grow into ‘being ready’ for having sex together. In this process, the word ‘love’ took on old-fashioned romantic connotations, and in reaction, many shunned it or overused it, thus eroding old pretensions that now demand more caution. Particularly in the early phases of experimental ‘try-out’ relationships, the word ‘love’ became too strong to use—but at the same time, virtually all old words for a love relation came to be stigmatised for smelling of old-fashioned inequality, of ‘horse and carriage and children in marriage’. Expressions such as ‘going steady’, verkering, ‘being engaged’, and vaste verkering, ‘a steady relationship’ are dropped or postponed as long as possible. They tend to reappear, however, in the language of parents and teachers at nursery and primary schools when talking about the intimate peer relationships of young ­children, from the ages of three and four upwards. One may hear, for example, that Olivia is Sam’s fiancée, that Oskar and Julia have verkering, and that these ‘couples’ are ‘in love’—an example of ‘overusing’ the word ‘love’ but also an example of how the word increasingly came to capture all relations in which people ‘have strong feelings’ for each other. The word ‘puppy love’, however, is carefully avoided. It has disappeared like most expressions of ridicule.

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In some of their ‘try-out’ relationships, teenagers and adolescents even avoid the word ‘relationship’ because it would suggest that one’s choice of partner has been made, lock, stock, and barrel, and ‘independence’ has been renounced. They use euphemisms such as ‘having something [a thing] with someone’, they ‘are seeing someone’ or refer to ‘my friend’ with many variations in emphasis on the first or the second word, but without further specification. There is great ingenuity in avoiding traditional connotations. Young Dutch people (in their late teens and twenties) have introduced the words prela and rela (Julen 2015); the latter consists of the first letters of the word relation, thus indicating only half the commitment and obligations of a full relationship3—which is more publicly known and acknowledged by at least parents and friends. A prela refers to a phase before a rela. The prela may or may not be monogamous, but the rela and the relationship are supposed to be. Before the prela, there may be a phase of dingesen, a neologism (‘thinging’), or of scharrelen, an old word that today has lost its negative connotation. This fading provides a clear example of the connections between the emancipation of women, young people, and their sexuality. Today, scharrelen means having an affair with someone just for the pleasure of it—for the sake of the affair, that is, without serious intentions or commitments or claims about the future. And the practice of scharrelen is placed early in serial ‘try-out’ relationships as an early phase in learning about love and lust. In a ­personal communication, a female journalist in her early twenties wrote to me: Girls often use the word when talking as women amongst each other. ‘We scharrel a bit’. That even sounds tough: ‘Oh indeed, a man, but ah, you know, just for the fun of it’. Many people of my generation

 Searching in Dutch etymological dictionaries for the word relatie—the Dutch translation of the English word relationship—suggests that when it appeared in the domain of intimacy (in the first half of the twentieth century), its main connotation was sexual, as in ‘an extra-marital relation’, that it acquired erotic/ romantic connotations only later, and that, subsequently, the latter connotation gained strength, probably hand in hand with the emancipation of women and sexuality. 3

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think it is quite normal to first have a period of scharrelen before getting a bit more serious; they don’t want to get into a prela or rela straight away. (van Sadelhoff 2015) Another expression of recent use in the Netherlands, is ‘flow’; young people speak about ‘my flow’ and of ‘being in a flow with’ someone. This expression is probably taken from the concept of ‘flow’ as developed by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, basically meaning ‘complete absorption in what one does’, and spread when people started using it for a ‘try-out’ relationship involving sex. These new concepts and expressions, dingesen, scharrelen, having a prela or a rela and being in a flow are all vague, and they breathe embarrassment and the fear of getting into a more serious full relationship too soon. Some interpret this vagueness as stemming from young people’s reluctance to enter into a commitment, enjoying their freedom and a varied sexual menu. Indeed, these people do exist, but they characteristically fail to feel and show the embarrassment that is characteristic of the whole quest for concepts and expressions that can possibly convey the various phases in the development of love and sex, of lust-balance relations and experiences. The most important condition for entering into a commitment is in the feeling for someone, and it seems that as long as one does not get at the root of that feeling, the commitment is postponed. Instead, there is a prela, a rela, or a flow or ‘something’.

3.11 Recent Developments Towards Integration a) Sexual Intimidation, Sexual Violence, and #MeToo In 2012, sexology research among the Dutch school population showed that 4 per cent of boys and 17 per cent of girls reported to be forced at least once to participate in sexual activities; in 2017, these figures were 2

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per cent and 11 per cent, respectively. From this and other sexology research, it is often difficult to answer what behaviours are actually lumped together in (self )reports on sexual intimidation and sexual violence, and a closely related difficulty stems from rather rapid developments in the social definition of these behaviours and their experience, in line with Caxton’s sentence: ‘Thingis sometyme alowed is now repreuid’.4 However, an overall trend of a declining prevalence of sexual intimidation all over the West is virtually undisputed. In Dutch sexology research [focusing] on young people, the topics ‘sexual intimidation’ and sexual coercion’—to extort sexual acts from someone—first appeared in 2005, and they confirmed that girls and boys who are used to more coercion in their social class and family also report using and experiencing greater degrees of coercion. They also confirmed a relatively big difference between boys and girls, a remnant of a tradition in which this difference was explained away by old phrases like ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘she asked for it’. These are still heard and remembered well, even though they recently suffered a serious blow from the #MeToo movement. This movement struck a sensitive nerve and brought a significant change in the social and sexual habitus of women and men. The significance can be shown by a comparison of the #MeToo movement with a change that occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s, when in the USA more and more boys and girls broke away from the traditional dating system by ‘going steady’. Previously, this practice had been rejected as ‘only for cowards’ who stick to just one member of the opposite gender, too scared to experience a larger variety. The increase of going steady was widely discussed from this and other perspectives, but its significance as a new phase in the emancipation of young women and their sexuality largely remained in the dark. This aspect of the transition was largely kept from sight: the traditional double morality that blamed and shamed young women for sex and its consequences functioned as a blindfold.

4

 From Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, printed at Westminster about 1477–1478.

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This tradition functioned as a regime of silence: women submerged in it felt too much shame to break the traditional silence on sexual abuse. In the dating system, women were held responsible and, therefore, open to being blamed for all sexual acts, whether unsanctioned or uncalled for: either she had not set limits (in time) or she was not truly virtuous. In the 1950s, dates with boys who are ‘out for what he can get’ augmented; these boys did not want to find out whether a girl was ‘for real’ or for ‘kicks’; they were merely sexually aggressive, as advocated by Dr. Albert Ellis in his best-selling book, Sex and the Single Man (1963): get as much of her body bare as quickly as you can. Deftness and speed often pay off in this regard … do it firmly, vigorously, in spite of some resistance on her part. Show her that you are determined to have her as nude as possible, even though you are not going literally to rip the clothes off her back and begin to rape her. (quoted in Bailey 1988: 92–93) But even if she liked the boy and trusted him, she would still run the risk that at some point ‘the boy begins to be insistent and urgent in his caresses … his fondling gets rougher and more intimate’ (Duvall 1958) and turns out to be unable ‘to stop necking and petting at a “safe” point’ (Unger 1960). Girls had to prevent their own but certainly his sexual excitement from ‘reaching the point of no return’ (Unger 1960). ‘If a pregnancy ensues, it is the girl who is “in trouble”’, while ‘the fellow’s future [is] at stake’. And you ‘know how prevalent is the male “double standard”’ (Duvall 1958: 204–205). With these dating conditions prevailing, how could girls enjoy much sexual activity? (for references and page numbers, see Wouters 2004: 134–135). In 2017, continued in 2018, the wave of protest by the #MeToo movement against virtually all degrees of sexual intimidation effectively broke the regime of silence that dominated these practices. It broke a major stronghold of this regime: internalised shame resulting from shaming the victims and pressured the social codes dominating these experiences to allow for deeper and stronger feelings of anger, indignation, and injus-

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tice. No longer are these feelings almost automatically silenced by feelings of shame, but now shame is increasingly silenced by them. This will increase the chance that a type of mutual consent develops that includes ‘being ready for the experience’ and that mutual attraction becomes integrated with mutual consent to the extent that both develop into a taken-­ for-­granted condition for all sexual pleasure.

b) Declining Differences Between Social Classes In the Netherlands, differences of social class seemed almost to disappear behind the rise of populist issues. An increase of ‘national tribalism’ coincided with decreasing tolerance towards immigrants, while on the other hand the Dutch people’s relatively greater tolerance in matters of (homo) sexuality, euthanasia, and recreational use of soft drugs, together with its interconnected greater self-steering capacities, were strongly confirmed by emphasising them as characteristic parts of the Dutch lifestyle (see Maris 2018, and Post in Ch. 10 of this reader). In matters of sexuality, differences between the social classes have diminished further. Compared to the 2012 report, the 2017 sequel of Dutch sexology research ‘Sex under 25’ (de Graaf et al. 2017) reported significant changes regarding young people at different levels of education, treated here as an indication of social class. A class difference that continued concerns young people in higher level education reporting to masturbate more often than those in lower level education. Another longstanding process continuity was that they reported to talk more often about sex and sexuality with their parents, their friends, and their last sex partner (de Graaf et al. 2017). As in previous years, their attitudes towards sex before marriage or towards sex without love are more positive, as are their attitudes towards sex in general. On a scale of pleasure, they rate their most recent sexual experience more highly. In addition to continuities, in other traditionally found differences between social classes, also reversals have been reported in 2017. Those in higher levels of education used to be less sexually active than their counterparts in lower level education, and now they report to have

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more sexual partners, and to have more sex than those in lower level of education, both in the previous year and throughout their lives so far. They also reported to having sex more often while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, to use dating apps for arranging (sexual) dates. Another reversal is in their reporting to practice ‘sexting’ more frequently than young people in lower-level schools: ‘12 per cent of young women and 13 per cent of young men have sent a nude picture or sex video of themselves to someone else in the past six months. That is much more than in 2012, when these figures were 4 per cent for young women and 6 per cent for young men’.

3.12 W  here Are We Now? Paradoxes and Interpretations The quest for new concepts can be taken as another signal that to ‘feel strongly for each other’, to love and to make love are increasingly perceived as learning processes with various stages or phases. From this perspective, it is obvious that all phases of this trial-and-error process of learning to develop a gratifying lust balance are taken increasingly seriously. This includes having casual sex: in 2012, 44 per cent of the boys and 25 per cent of the girls approved of having sex-for-the-sake-of-sex; in 2017, the corresponding percentages had risen to 59 and 44 per cent. This does not mean they themselves practice what they approve of, for three-quarters of young girls and boys had developed a relationship with the person with whom they had their first sexual encounter (de Graaf et al. 2017). Many young people today start earlier with having a ‘try-out’ relationship and postpone the moment of having sex and also the moment of ‘settling down’ or marry. For them, the duration of the quest for a gratifying lust balance, with its various phases and variety of ‘try-out’ relationships, takes longer and also takes more consecutive partners than they and/or their parents might wish, but—paradoxical as it may seem—both are much more likely to have originated from a rise rather than a decline in their longings and demands for intimacy, openness and warmth.

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The main drivers of the emancipation of sexuality are related not only to rising levels of equality and intimacy between women and men, but also to rising expectations about what constitutes a gratifying lust balance. Emancipation processes and decreasing inequality in gender relations implied that both women and men developed higher expectations of their love life, and as parents they also developed higher expectations of their family life—and that they accordingly make higher demands on each other. This rise in expectations of a gratifying lust balance, the rising importance of love in particular, probably also explains why in 2017 half of young people on average reported to have had their first coitus one and a half years later than in 2012; the average age in 2012 was 17.1, in 2017 this was 18.6. A similar change occurred with other forms of sex, such as kissing, while the importance of sex is rated higher, and both genders also report to highly (>90 per cent) enjoy sexual feelings. Taken together, these data indicate a further development of what was brought to view by sexology research of 1968 and 1974, namely a strengthening of the conditions of ‘feeling strongly for each other’ and mutual consent about ‘being ready for it’, that is, ready for sex as an exploration of physical, personal, and relational feelings. Another strengthening of these conditions can be read in the short-term change in reports of 12- to 17-yearold girls and boys on having experienced coitus: in 2012, about one-quarter reported this experience, and in 2017 the one in four had been reduced to one in seven (de Graaf et al. 2017). Another paradox is in the connection between these rising expectations and demands, on the one hand, and fidelity in relationships lasting for shorter and shorter periods, on the other: increasing numbers of young people have increasing numbers of consecutive relatively short ‘try-out’ relationships, and adults also tend to increasingly live in relationships of serial monogamy. Rising expectations of love and rising demands on each other did not prevent divorce rates rising, quite the contrary; but this rise, too, is much more likely to have originated from a rise rather than from a decline in demands for intimacy. These rising demands and expectations largely explain the new emphasis, in this ­century, on the love side of the lust balance, and also why love has become more difficult, lasting love in particular.

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Another paradox is that protests against pornification and sexualisation, even those against paedophiles, are at least to some extent counterproductive because they tend to keep lust-balance questions topical, thus raising the level of consciousness of the erotic and sexual and the level of sensitivity to erotic and sexual aspects of relationships. They are, therefore, instrumental in propelling further sexualisation and eroticisation in the direction of further integration. Accordingly, sexualisation and eroticisation processes have neither stalled nor changed direction, quite the contrary: it seems more likely that they are accelerating (Wouters 2010a). It seems likely, for example, that women will advance their tradition of accentuating sexual attractiveness as they continue to ‘come into their own’ as sexual subjects, and that further eroticisation of sex can be expected from men as they continue to be under the influence of what has been described here as a pincer movement. Moreover, there is reason to expect that established levels of equality, openness, and intimacy will be maintained and transmitted to the next generation. This reason lies in the likelihood that children and teenagers who are raised and grow up on a certain level of intimacy, openness, and equality will expect and try to develop a similar or, if possible, even higher level in relations of love and friendship with people of their own generation. It becomes their ‘figurational ideal’ (Stolk and Wouters 1987b). From a very early age onwards, these ideals and expectations become deeply ingrained at the level of individual habitus as a relational code and a figurational ideal, providing significant sources of meaning and value in life. Therefore, as they grow up, young people will long to attain at least similar levels of intimacy, warmth, and openness in their own intimate relationships that they experienced in their youth. Usually, they want to improve on this level and set their standard higher. Surveying the trends sketched in this chapter, I think there is enough ground for the conclusion that, since the 1880s, love and lust have been involved in a process of integration, and also for the hypothesis that the quest for a more gratifying lust balance between sexual and relational intimacy will continue to drive the processes of sexualisation and eroticisation in the direction of their integration.

4 Informalisation of Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the We–I Balance

4.1 Introduction1 The previous chapter centred on changes in steering codes governing the longings of young people for sex and love, largely captured theoretically as changes in the lust balance. These changes are directly related to significant conditions for the beginning of human life. This chapter will focus on the other end of life. At this phase, changes in steering codes governing the moments of dying and mourning will be indicated and largely captured as changes in the we–I balance, a concept coined by Norbert Elias (2010b). And at both of these life phases, it appears that steering codes in the West have changed in the direction of informalisation, most significantly during the second half of the 1960s and particularly in the 1970s (Wouters 1990b). In the Fin de Siècle and the Roaring Twenties, many ‘violations’ of traditional practices also triggered vehement debates,

 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Body & Society 8/1 (2002): 1–27.

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for example, around the introduction of cremating dead bodies, but the changes in dying and mourning during the ‘Expressive Revolution’ were so overwhelming for many that the ‘standard practice of the 1950s’ became their main standard of comparison. In the 1970s, in contrast to the ‘standard practice of the 1950s’, many of the dying were informed about their condition, and they discussed it openly with intimates. Funeral ceremonies ceased to be fixed and uniform events from which children are barred. Only a few of those attending a funeral were still wearing black clothes; dress has become much less formal, and music and speeches had become much more personal. At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, undertakers reported these changes as being widespread.2 In the second half of the 1960s, the mourning ritual of wearing black mourning attire and black bands fell into abeyance, first in big cities, to disappear completely by the early 1970s. Thus, the principal symptoms of mourning vanished from public life. More and more obituary notices stated, ‘No visiting’, ‘The cremation has taken place privately’, or words to this effect. Some ten years later, a quest for new rituals—new rites of passage and sacrosanct acts—emerged. These changes over decades indicate a significant change in the process of mourning, which is not as homogeneous as the word may suggest. It is poised between a highly institutionalised social obligation and a highly individual and personal feeling, respectively a public and a private process, both being captured in the concept of a we–I balance. In the 1960s and 1970s, mourning

 From the 1970s onwards, Dutch undertakers also perceived a trend of keeping the deceased at home until the funeral service and to withdraw part of the direction of these services from them, undertakers, into one’s own hands (Sax et al. 1989; Enklaar 1995). Most reported these changes to be restricted to a minority of their clients, but all speak of growing numbers and of an expanding ‘funerary market’. It became large enough to allow sculptors, photographers, and others to start selling sculptures as gravestones and photo reportages of funeral ceremonies (Paauw 1998: 555), to establish ‘funerary shops’ and a ‘ritual bureau’ (in Belgium), selling ideas and services for ‘big moments’ (De Morgen, 3 April 1999). 2

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became increasingly privatised and individualised; it became less of a formalised social obligation. The traditional pattern of the ritual was increasingly experienced as an external constraint, no longer compatible with rising demands for individual authenticity and personal identity in expressing the right feeling with the right words and gestures (Elias 2010a: 26). Thus, at the same time as the feelings connected to ‘big moments of life and death’ became more personal, more private, and less ritualised, both the need and the opportunity to find public recognition of these feelings seemed to diminish. Development in this direction stalled and came to an end in the early 1980s, when a quest for new rituals emerged. It was not, however, a return to the tradition of formalised social obligations. In comparison, the new rituals were not only more varied and informal, they were also more individualised and personal. In other words, first there was a major change towards informalisation and later, in the 1980s, towards re-formalisation. In an attempt to understand and interpret these changes in mourning rituals, first their decline and then the quest for new rituals, I will use several examples from the Netherlands. I will argue that these public expressions signal a rising need to find public recognition of personal mourning and that, via these rituals, participants seek to assert membership of a larger symbolic or ‘imagined’ community. Mourning rituals aim at what Victor Turner (1995 [1969]) has called symbolic communitas, the feeling of connectedness to a larger symbolic community. They aim at evoking the kind of solidarity that surpasses hierarchical differences. In this way, they provide social recognition of the (future) loss of one’s own life or that of an intimate, while at the same time offering ways to regulate intense feelings like fear, despair, powerlessness, and sorrow. In other words, these rituals have a social and a psychic aspect: they have the twin function of—on the one hand— diminishing the danger of succumbing to these intense emotions by raising a feeling of solidarity and—on the other—of enhancing the sense of being connected to a larger community, on which basis these emotions are acknowledged as well as dimmed and kept under control. In this chapter, I will elaborate these connections.

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4.2 C  hanges in the We–I Balance: Solidarisation and Individualisation To what extent can the changes in social and psychic functions of mourning rituals since the 1960s be interpreted as changes in the we–I balance of individuals, first towards individualisation and later towards ‘solidarization’? In the two decades before the 1980s, as mourning processes changed in the direction of becoming more private and individualised, this was in keeping with a more general shift in social habitus, particularly in the we–I balance of individuals: their I-identity took on a stronger emotive charge as compared to their we-identity (the groups people refer to as we). In this trend towards individualisation, as the we–I balance was tilted towards the I, the need for the twin function of rituals declined. Some socially prescribed formal mourning rituals disappeared, and others were included in the general spurt of informalisation. Both the ‘revival of death’—the rising interest in dying and mourning—and the quest for new rituals have manifested themselves all over the West to varying degrees, more strongly in the Netherlands than, for example, in Britain (cf Walter 1997). In the early 1980s, the emerging quest for new mourning rituals was part of a whole range of changes towards ‘reformalisation’. Again, this was in keeping with a more general shift in social habitus and a more general change in the we–I balance of individuals: their we-identity and we-ideals came to be emphasised more strongly as their longing for the sense of belonging intensified. As there is no self- or I-identity without we-identity, the question is how they relate. Obviously, they do not relate according to a zero-sum principle: the individuals involved in the quest for new rituals came to attach rising importance to their we-ideals and we-identities, but this scarcely, if at all, affected the importance attached to their I-identities. They take full responsibility for their performance; it is not—and certainly not unquestioningly—delegated to authorities like priests. This has made the quest for new, expressive rituals far from easy: how to create a form that feels authentic, knowing that you are closely observed? Indeed, in their attempts

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to invent a rite many people failed and thereby p ­ rovoked embarrassment. In this context, the word embarrassment was mentioned quite often, for instance, by a director of a large (Dutch) firm of undertakers: To make new ritual … is not easy at all… But they are decidedly searching for new forms. There are people who, for example, want to honour the deceased by reciting their own poems in the chapel at the cemetery. That can be very moving. But also very awkward… Sometimes highly embarrassing. (Hove 1989) One more example: If nobody says or does anything in the chapel, an enormous tension may mount, but the opposite may create embarrassment. Someone wanted to hear songs from Bette Midler, for example, sung a cappella, by a black person… At the end of the ceremony, white balloons were launched, it was almost burlesque. (Schaepman 1992) If only from this insecurity of form, one may conclude that the trend towards creating new rites was rather new. Obviously, to face death and death anxiety via new rituals that have the power to convince as authentic was still more an ideal than a practice.3 However, it is undisputed that more and more people have been drawn towards this ideal since the early 1980s, when a quest for new rituals spread and a variety were designed and tried. This problem of authenticity in particular demonstrates the unrelenting importance individuals attached to their I-identity.

 Journalists wrote about this quest, but with social scientists I found only few occasional references. Seale mentions ‘social movements for a (…) re-establishment of communal funeral rituals’ (1998: 201), and in Tony Walter’s The Revival of Death one finds ‘examples that show the evolution of more personalised funeral ritual’ (1994: 183). 3

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4.3 F rom a ‘Regime of Silence and Sacred Lies’ to an ‘Emancipation of Emotions’ This section tries to describe these changes as developments in emotion regulation. When the old rituals faded or disappeared, the danger of succumbing to the intense emotions involved in dying and mourning—one may become desperate and experience a deep sense of meaninglessness— was to be controlled in more individual and personal ways. In addition, as individuals tended to form more intimate bonds in smaller circles (Lofland 1978), feelings of bereavement and grief will have intensified. People had to cope with these feelings with less of the public support or the social recognition of individual loss and grief than the old mourning rituals used to provide. Therefore, demands on individual emotion regulation were raised considerably. In Harper Lee’s bestseller To Kill a Mocking Bird, a woman dying of cancer discovers that she has become addicted to morphine as a painkiller. Although she knows she is dying, she wants to overcome this addiction, so she stops taking morphine, and she succeeds: ‘according to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew’. Indeed, this story is told to show ‘what real courage is’ (Lee 1976 [1960]: 118). It exemplifies a conviction that prevailed until the second half of the twentieth century: courage was mainly defined as the capacity to suppress fear and pain, and to endure what cannot be suppressed without making a sound. Except for a few rituals, one was expected to maintain a regime of silence and denial. According to Ariès (1981), this regime spread from about 1850 and it remained dominant until the end of the 1950s. My study of twentieth-century changes in the Dutch nursing journal TvZ (Tijdschrift voor Ziekenverpleging), nursing handbooks, and books on medical ethics shows that until the mid-1950s, as a rule doctors did not inform the dying of their terminal situation (Wouters 1990a, b, c).4 The emotions of the

 For this chapter, the most important Dutch Journal of Nursing Tijdschrift voor Ziekenverpleging or TvZ has been an important source of information. I studied the 1930 volume of this journal as if it were the minutes for that year, and I did the same with each fifth volume after 1930 up to 1990. 4

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dying and their intimates could only be expressed to a limited extent in a few rituals—administering the last sacraments and reading the Bible. All other attention to emotions was blocked by the social command to be brave and courageous—that is, to keep silent, possibly assisted by opium et mentiri, by pia fraus or ‘sacred lies’. This practice was based on the common assumption that destroying the hope of recovery would be too great a burden on any person; it would cause unbearable suffering in the remaining part of their life. The regime of silence also applied to mourning. The division into full, half, and light mourning already demonstrates that mourning was a highly institutionalised social obligation. Wearing visible signs of mourning was an established custom, and one finds extensive regulations about them in manners books. For example: ‘During the first six weeks of full mourning, one does not leave the house to go anywhere, except to church’ (Groskamp-ten Have n.d. [1940s and 1950s]: 254). Public mourning rituals required a long and frequent confrontation with the loss of a relative, thus demanding a strong but tight and polished kind of emotion regulation. Emotions of mourning could only find limited and symbolic public expression in the mourning rituals.5 Other public expressions were soon interpreted as symptoms of weakness and would damage the person’s reputation. Thus, these social obligations were also permeated by fears of losing face and status. Today, old mourning rituals are sometimes believed to have been public expressions of individual grief. However, the prevailing code of that time prevented exactly such an expression. The rituals were quite fixed and uniform. Yet, they did offer a we-feeling, a feeling of connectedness to a larger we-group, the we-group of the faithful and that of society at large. Thus, they bestowed social recognition of loss and grief. They helped people in gaining and keeping control over their emotions, and also in demonstrating how courageously their loss was carried. In addition, they also functioned to mark social differences: the more important the deceased, the more elaborate and exuberant the mourning ceremony. Thus, these ceremonies also served to cover feelings of despair and powerlessness under a public display of respectable chic. But such displays  The gathering after the funeral could be an exception, depending on its degree of informality. 5

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should not be confused with a public expression of individual grief. The differentiation was according to class, that is, to group identity, not to personal identity. In terms of the we-I balance, the I-identity of individuals was highly subordinated to their we-identity. In the private domain, similar demands applied; here too, tight norms of courage were operative. Even among intimates, showing grief, anxiety, or anger was soon interpreted as weakness. To share these feelings, as is normal and expected today, was hardly accepted; it soon counted as ‘letting oneself go’ or ‘exposing oneself ’. One had to bear one’s grief in a dignified way, which boiled down to showing as little of it as possible. Although in some communities this old code is preserved to some extent, many people today consider that attitude to be almost barbaric and certainly unhealthy. Much of what once counted as ‘exposure’ has turned to ‘show who you are’! According to dominant contemporary standards, defence mechanisms such as denial and repression were rampant. Since the 1960s, many of these old rituals have been attacked, changed, or abandoned. Soon, they came to be seen as stiff social obligations, rather empty of feeling and meaning. Public mourning rituals like wearing mourning bands and black mourning attire have become obsolete. Allowing for differences in pace, this trend is also reflected in the German, English, and American, as well as the Dutch manners books I studied. Here is a typical example from the most popular Dutch etiquette book from the 1940s to the 1970s (Groskamp-ten Have). After an exact copy of the text on mourning of the 12th edition, the following sentences were added in the 13th edition (1965): ‘These rules relate to formal mourning. Censure of those who ignore these rules for whatever reasons becomes no one. A person may show his grief in quite a different way from another. Nobody has the right to pass judgement going by superficialities’. These lines admit that the old rules are or have become ‘formal’ and ‘superficial’, while the individualist’s creed—‘everybody is different’—is also expressed. They mirror the drastic change from mourning rituals carried out within the community to grief processes borne by individual people in private (Walter 1994); they signify a change in the we–I balance towards the I. At the same time, large numbers of books on topics related to dying and mourning appeared on an expanding market; the interest in mourning processes was increasing considerably: ‘Mourning seems to be a topic

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of wide-scale discovery in the 1960s, first as the subject of research and theorising, subsequently as a field for developing special therapies’ (Opzeeland-de Tempe 1980: 14/17; for the USA, see Filene 1999). Simultaneously, paying elaborate attention to the emotions triggered by dying and mourning grew up as the new ideal, soon to be dominant. As a rule, every lethal diagnosis and, therefore, every approaching death was to be announced in ‘bad-news-conversations’; and ‘hiding behind religious or other set phrases’, as it was called in the Dutch journal of nursing (TvZ 1960: 247), was increasingly branded as denial and repression. In the early 1970s, an enormous number of books and articles on dying and mourning demonstrated how the collective defence of the intense emotions involved in dying and mourning had lost its rigidity, thus forcing all concerned to face them while at the same time keeping them under control. Where once there used to be fixed rituals for everyone—and for the rest a regime of silence—there came a multitude of ways of sharing anxieties and other emotions with intimates in private, while these emotions and their regulation are open for discussion in all kinds of public situations. This ‘emancipation of emotions’—their appearance in the centre of personality, consciousness—was the reverse of denying and repressing them. The old ideal of courage referred to the strength needed to express these emotions only via fixed rituals; the new ideal of courage refers to the strength needed to face the approaching end of life, to empathise with the dying, and to control (death) anxieties which present themselves. ‘Emancipation of emotions’ thus refers to the capacity to face and cope with these anxieties and other emotions. Growing attention to both the finality and the ‘finale’ of people implied an intensified sense of mortality, greater awareness of temporality, and more urgent and encompassing why-questions, changing the whole feeling for life and death.

4.4 F rom Fixed Rules in Closed Networks Towards Flexible Rules in Open Networks These changes can be illuminated by viewing them within the framework of large-scale processes of differentiation and integration within welfare states. In succeeding waves of emancipation, increasing numbers of peo-

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ple were absorbed and assimilated within increasingly dense networks of interdependency. As old social dividing lines opened up and competition for social status and a more personal identity intensified, old possibilities of keeping a social and psychic distance from each other diminished (Wouters 1992, 1999a,b, 2007). The relations between doctors and patients changed accordingly, and doctors became increasingly unable to hide a bad prognosis from their patients. In addition, medical knowledge expanded to include the details of most terminal prognoses; patients demanded to be informed about them and soon doctors could be legally punished for not informing their patients. The next step was that they also wanted to participate in decisions about whether to continue or stop medical treatment; requests for euthanasia multiplied (Keizer 2018b: 36–41). In these processes, the meaning of many ‘fixed rules’ turned negative. Rules in general lost rigidity and absoluteness; to repeat from earlier chapters, they came to depend more upon the kind of situation and relation, demanding a more flexible and reflexive application, if possible through mutual consent. This implied that rules and norms of a rather fixed kind became too predictable and too rigid. The same goes for many of the old rituals, which came to be experienced as formal, impersonal, and aloof, while their hierarchical and enveloping traits provoked protest and even disgust. In other words, traditional ways of regulating emotions, as via rituals, lost part of their ‘defence’ or ‘protective’ function. As the demands for a more personal identity and individual authenticity rose, they increasingly came to be experienced as ‘stiff’, and their performance as too obvious, as ‘insincere’, even as a ‘fraud’ or as ‘deceit’. In this development, to the extent that the old mourning rituals were attacked and abandoned, the shelter they used to provide by evoking the sense of being connected to traditional ‘symbolic communitas’ was demolished. Although some of the old rituals disappeared completely and the whole ‘regime of silence’ ceased to be dominant from the 1960s onwards, of course it did not disappear immediately. Many people continued to demand stillness and solemnity around the dead and their graves, although a growing minority saw no need for that and rejected this attitude as a fear-ridden form of distancing the dead from the living (Elias 2010a: 31–32). And the old regime still manifests itself every time the

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bereaved unthinkingly leave practically all direction to an undertaker. In the Netherlands, an emotion regulation similar to that of the ‘regime of silence’ was still found to prevail in the first half of the 1980s among people living in traditional, rather closed family networks. From their study of the main differences in ways of coping with divorce between people in these networks and people living more individually in more open networks of friends, two Dutch sociologists concluded that for those living in traditional networks it was impossible to open up and release their feelings, not even in their most intimate circle: One prefers to forget, the sooner the better. Life just goes on. … Talking is perceived as ‘just moaning’, as ‘making it hard on oneself ’ and turned out to be an equivalent to gossiping, complaining and accusing. It is perceived as the sort of behaviour that brings one down. (Oosterbaan and Zeldenrust 1988: 942–944) Perceptions like these functioned to subordinate the interests and feelings of each single individual to those of the group, in this case the family. The people in these rather closed networks were lagging behind in the general shift of the we–I balance in the direction of the I.  They had no other means of defence than the family and its honour; they were, and had to be, dedicated to that end. Their tradition, these sociologists report, embodies an attempt to withdraw from being confronted with one’s feelings and motives [related to the divorce]: a defence mechanism… Getting over difficulties is achieved predominantly by getting away from them, almost by ‘expelling’ them. These people often make a radical break with old situations and people. The banning of emotions seems to go hand in hand with banning people (Oosterbaan and Zeldenrust 1985: 214, 217). In these groups of people living in traditional, rather closed networks, the ‘regime of silence’ and its traditional ideal of courage seems to have been ‘preserved’. The we–I balance of these individuals had remained more traditional, emphasising their (traditional) we-identity more strongly. The same goes for many non-western countries, where the interests and feelings of each single individual are strongly subordinated to those of the group. Hence, they have ‘mourning rituals in which the behaviour

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of those who live on, including their expression of certain emotions, is prescribed so rigorously by the social rules, that any personal experience almost seems to be ruled out’ (Opzeeland-de Tempe 1980: 14). This observation goes against the tendency to romanticise non-Western mourning rituals, not just for being more elaborate and expressive, as they usually are, but also for a more personal expression of individual feelings. The latter is not in accordance with the extent and pattern of individualisation, which does not allow such personal freedom: tight organisation and regulation of ritual go hand in hand with intense expression of emotion (Huntington and Metcalf 1979). Romanticising non-­ Western mourning rituals—‘they commemorate the life that was, we mourn the life that is lost’—spread together with a rising interest in dying and mourning—that is, with increasing awareness of old and new difficulties connected to the experience and expression of these processes in the West.

4.5 R  ituals and Feelings of Despair and Powerlessness With regard to dying and mourning, the process of an ‘emancipation of emotions’ coincided with an ‘emancipation of the dying’: an increasing number of them came to demand a voice in decision-making at the end of life. Today, ‘delegators’, that is, those who prefer to delegate the decision-­making to their physicians, to God, or to fate, have become a minority (Kelner 1995). For many, the new power to decide includes the choice whether or not to prolong life, that is, to prolong dying. Confrontation with this kind of choice has triggered a variety of experiments and exercises in enduring and coping with feelings of despair and powerlessness. More and more people have come to realise that doctors who continue to treat their patients after the chance of curing them has vanished do so because they fear the despair of their patients and because they are unable to endure their own powerlessness. Yet, the questions of where to draw the line and of how doctors and patients should learn to master these ‘choking’ emotions are still controversial. One discussion, for instance, centres on ‘the “magical power” of treatment’ (The 1999)— that is, the significance of a glimmer of hope at the moment when one is

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no longer poised between hope and fear because the prognosis is clearly fatal; how to avoid being driven to despair? Here are some illustrations: ‘Physicians should dig in their heels more when confronted with patients wanting to continue pointless treatments,’ says [oncologist] Cleton. While stating this, he is startled by the word pointless. All of a sudden, Cleton’s study seems to be filled with reproachful patients, shouting that these cures they take are perfectly sensible to them: they represent a last gleam of hope. [When asked whether chemotherapy is a form of terminal care, someone from a cancer centre in Amsterdam answers]: ‘I’m not sure whether you can put it that way … the preservation of hope is, I think, a legitimate reason for cures with doubtful benefits. It gives people the time they need to become more fully aware of the fact that they are dying. Alternative therapies also fulfil that function … Extensive research showed that patients who had entered an ‘alternative therapy’ knew bloody well that it wouldn’t cure them. One does something, which is the point.’ (Braams 1994) Yet, the fact one is ‘doing something’, whether a ‘pointless cure’ or an ‘alternative therapy’, may nevertheless create a secret expectation, often against one’s better judgement. When this flicker of hope evaporates too, the feelings of despair and powerlessness, particularly the inherent urgency ‘to do something’, may (particularly in the Dutch context) pressure patients towards asking for euthanasia and doctors towards practising it. Rites and rituals could function to prevent this, writes the Dutch novelist and former doctor in a nursing home, Bert Keizer: ‘A rite could offer protection against unexpected fits of despair or panic’. The same, he continues, goes for when the suffering has become so unbearable that the decision to practice euthanasia nevertheless is taken: What helps me through this riteless area is to memorise a sequential list of actions, so I won’t come to the dying person like someone who has roamed into a supermarket and will now decide in a leisurely way what to select from all the possible options before getting to the counter. I have taught myself to make the sequence of actions also known to the other participants, for instance by announcing in

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advance: ‘I arrive at seven thirty and then we will first shake hands. Then I will call your son in and fetch the nurse’ and so on. That way I hope to knot a rope bridge over the abyss. (Keizer 1994: 78 and 79) Keizer is aware that by sharing his sequence of actions with the other participants, he is creating a new rite, which clearly is not directed at bringing any hope, nor does it have any other sense than to create this bond and feeling of doing something together and thus provide a steering code for the end of life. To do something pointless, to do it without any belief it would help, and yet doing it together: this is a characteristic of many rituals (Staal 1978). In contrast to these modern rituals, traditional rituals often promise some wholesome effect. This is also a leftover from an era in which rituals were still incorporated as a fully fledged force within a whole field of forces and counter-forces impinging upon situations and people conceived of as dangerous and threatening. In recent decades, as medical prognoses have improved to the point where it became possible to exclude any hope, there has been a proliferation of moments in which people come to realise that (approaching) disaster can no longer be countered. The spread of this kind of prognosis also helps to understand why the call for rites and rituals has expanded and intensified. When confronted with such a prognosis, many will be inclined to seek protection against despair in some rite or ritual. Therefore, the new rituals are directed less at gaining hope than at creating a social code that provides the feeling of being together. Doing something together helps to stave off despair and to withstand feelings of powerlessness. The quest for this kind of ritual signifies an attempt at finding a balance between hope and despair that is viable to the end. Such a balance demands control of inclinations towards hope or despair, and to endure the remaining—and possibly intensified—feelings of powerlessness. The ideal is (to learn) to be courageously powerless (‘acceptance’). In attempts at finding this balance and in developing this courage, people not only build upon their intimate bonds, they also reach out for the feeling of being connected to a larger community, to a ‘symbolic communitas’. To what extent one’s society can serve as such will depend— among other things—upon the sense of belonging to it. This sense will in

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turn depend upon the prevalent we-image and group charisma in relation to the nation-state, particularly its perceived degree of social integration and cohesion. In other words, the strength derived from this (or any) ‘symbolic communitas’ will vary with the strength of collective we-­ identities and we-ideals.

4.6 T  ugs of War and Ambivalence Towards Mourning Ritual The question how recent changes in collective we-ideals and we-identities are connected to changes in mourning rituals is, however, far from simple. Both kinds of changes are highly differentiated. Many or most mourning rituals are still to be found on the religious side of the ritual spectrum. Their performance reaches for a feeling of being connected not only to the worldly communities of fellow believers and fellow citizens but also to a kind of reality that is represented as ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’. In the first half of the twentieth century, this hierarchy was still pretty much taken for granted, allowing people to make direct and plain references to it. Today, these references are much more indirect: non-religious people as well as those with doubts about religion had to be taken into account with the increase both in their numbers and in the intensity of these doubts. This secularisation ran in tandem with democratisation: in more equal relationships and under the influence of strong ideals of equality, authoritarian claims and constraints provoked critical reactions, an ­attitude that extended over representations of supernatural authorities.6  Until the 1960s, the Netherlands belonged to the most ecclesiastic and churchgoing nations of Europe; almost 60 years later, with a nondenominational population of about 60 per cent, it is one of the most secularised countries in the world. Here, as in many other western countries, traditional religious doctrines have faded even among members of a church. For an account of the transformation of American religion from the ‘dwelling’ institutional religiosity of the 1950s to the present, more personal, privatised, and ‘non-institutional inner life of everyday spirituality’, see Wuthnow (1998). For a broader discussion of ‘the eclipse of eternity’, see Walter (1996) and Bauman (1992a). 6

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Thus, even for most religious people, the community of fellow believers lost much of its strength and cohesion.7 In contrast, purely secular or ‘earthly’ dying and mourning rituals reach for a feeling of being connected to a symbolic community of human beings, not to the kind of reality depicted as ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’. Of course, many compromises and transitional forms have emerged, rituals that reach for both kinds of connectedness.8 They represent an attempt to combine old and new ideals and practices. Further differentiation of the ritual spectrum according to the pattern of their we–I balance seems scarcely possible: how to determine to what extent they appeal to traditional and to individualised ideals of social cohesion and continuity? The overall trend and pattern, however, is clear enough to conclude that—as in any other domain—here too, the co-­existence of contrasting ideals, practices, and types of emotion regulation is accompanied by ambivalent feelings from which hardly anyone is able to escape. This is characteristic of a period of transition.  In the course of these processes of democratisation and secularisation, the nonreligious perspective on rituals has become quite common: many non-religious and not even sacrosanct habits and usages have come to be perceived as rituals. Since the 1960s, in colloquial language the term has come to be used for a multitude of habits and customs, for example, the ‘ritual’ of greeting (shaking hands, the ‘social kiss’—once or twice?). Irving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual (1967) and the reader Secular Ritual (Moore and Myerhoff 1977) provide many other examples. Even sadomasochistic practices have been characterised as rituals, as is indicated in the subtitle of a German study of sadomasochism: scenes and rituals (Wetzstein et al. 1993). Today, many religious and religiously oriented people also use the term in this new way, although they sometimes make explicit qualifications: ‘These everyday rituals will clearly not serve again and again to establish contact with the very deepest reality’ (Lukken 1984: 24/5). In this way, they claim a superior position in a hierarchy of rituals. 8  Here is an example: 7

One of the women from a women’s group in which they rubbed each other’s hands with an odoriferous ointment comments upon this practice: ‘I felt intensely connected to the other women in this ritual. To me, this is its blessing’. Upon the question ‘Does this ritual also lead you to God?’, she answers: ‘Oops, I am a little allergic to that word, I’d rather speak of the ineffable expressing itself in human solidarity’ (Trouw, 26 July 1994).

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In such a period, people usually feel torn and ambivalent. But also between people and between groups of people, usually there is a tug of war going on. For example, in an interview, a philosopher and advocate of rituals said: ‘If you cannot find rituals that back up social cohesion and societal continuity, you are left bloody unprotected. That would demand way too much emancipated maturity of people’. The interviewer, a sociologist and journalist, confronted him with the question: ‘But how much space for collective ritual can there possibly be, if the highest creed is “I am the one who decides what is best for me”?’ (Vuijsje 1988). Here, old and new were in confrontation: the social protection of a we-group as against the self-protection of the individual. In the sentence quoted first, the philosopher emphasises the need for protection by a we-group, the ‘symbolic communitas’ invoked by ‘doing something together’, but in the next sentence he implicitly acknowledges the ideal of a strong personality, mature and emancipated enough to provide sufficient self-protection. The whole quest for new ritual and for social steering codes at the end of life is saturated with these tugs of war and ambivalent feelings: we-­ ideals exert pressure towards actions that reach for a feeling of connectedness, I-ideals pressure towards attempts at controlling the feelings of despair and powerlessness under one’s own steam. For many people emphasising their I- or ego-ideals, the quest for new rituals has the stigma of deploying a bunch of affected phrases and actions, of compulsive behaviour, of conjuring, of a ‘defence mechanism’. For them, someone claiming a mature or emancipated personality should never be guilty of so much ‘self-deception’ and/or inauthenticity. They soon experience the form of new rituals as an all-too-obvious, thin, and therefore embarrassing demonstration of courageous powerlessness, an experience which strengthens their aversion to such performances as well as their motivation never to indulge in them. Aversion to new rituals may also arise out of the longing to maintain more traditional we-feelings and thus social continuity. An example is found in attacks on the new ritual of personal obituary notices, often directly addressed to the deceased and the circle of intimates. Here is an example of such an attack:

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The most striking development in the wording of a part of contemporary obituary notices is the apparent assumption that the deceased in the hereafter will continue to read newspapers. ‘Dear ann, I will always be connected to you—petra’. No family name, no address, no date. And one has to strain oneself in order to suppress the question whether there was no opportunity to pledge this allegiance before death. Another development is that the messenger’s main objective seems to have his own feelings written on the wall of publicity, rather than announcing who has died. ‘Tom, together on our bicycles, turning all sorts of corners, through various valleys, cycling to the top. Gee, what perfect cyclists we were—your pal charles’ … Yes, but who has died? … no data according to registry office, only personal expression of emotions. Why is all this printed in the newspaper? … In my opinion, telling indistinct intimacies to everyone in obituary notices has to be viewed in connection with the general trend towards pouring one’s innermost feelings out on the street. Apparently, feelings have no significance unless they have been shouted out of the window or pushed onto the public marketplace. (van Run 1994) This author ends his attack by instigating, also on behalf of ‘the newspaper reader’, ‘that the text is restricted to what is justified for publication, that it be kept within the bounds of good taste—which will be best secured by sticking closely to tradition’. In this attack, these personal obituary notices are not perceived as a form of new ritual, only as an expression of bad taste. However, the public acknowledgement and endorsement of strong personal feelings, as expressed in these notices, designates them as a modern ritual. It is an attempt to connect with a ‘symbolic communitas’. And that these texts are pointless, on which basis their publication is considered ‘not justified’, is also a characteristic shared with many other rituals. A few years after these personal notices started to be published in Dutch newspapers, memorial notices commemorating the first, second, or fifth anniversary of the loss of a deceased beloved began to appear. Usually, these notices are written in the style of a report, not in that of

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rapport. Their function, however, is quite similar to the obituary notices attacked for being pointless: they publicly express the grief of bereaved individuals. Another example of the quest for new mourning rituals is from July 1995, when all over the city of Amsterdam A4 posters were glued to walls, and so on, stating: jippert

/ true / angels / leave / early / your friends

By this large-scale action, shortly after the death of a teenager in a traffic accident, these young people confronted themselves again and again with the early death of their friend. For them, this probably had a function similar to that involved in the confrontation inherent in the traditional wearing of visible signs of mourning; they will have experienced it as a form of public acknowledgement of their loss.9 At a moment like this, when they strongly feel themselves to be thrown back upon their own small circle, this kind of public demonstration of mourning fulfils a deep need. Just like the obituary notices, these posters demonstrate that precisely in these moments of grief there is an urge to shout one’s feelings to the world, a strong need for the feeling of being connected to that world, to a large we-group, to society at large. Only one new ritual succeeded in becoming established in many countries: International Aids Memorial Day. The first one was held was held in San Francisco, USA, in 1983, when the cause of aids was still unknown. By the end of the 1980s, this Memorial Day and the Aids Memorial Quilt had come to create a sense of global solidarity, partly because it attracts world-wide attention. The shock caused by the death of young people was strong and widespread; it triggered many other attempts at creating new rituals.  This kind of demonstration of private emotions in public occurs more often in the domain of love: two names and a heart carved into a tree, love declarations on viaducts, etc. are also attempts at connecting intense personal feelings to a larger ‘symbolic communitas’. 9

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4.7 Nostalgic Longing for Old We-Identities It is quite common to explain the (cautious) revival of mourning rituals by referring only or predominantly to the process of secularisation, for example: ‘Secularisation has brought bareness and cold—the people have lost their sense of direction’ (Schaepman 1992). And an article entitled ‘Rituals Against Present Aridity’ proclaims propositions like: ‘The decline of the church and the informalisation of society robbed us of a large variety of symbols and customs that, although outdated, enriched life and gave it colour’; and ‘the vague feeling of discomfort that a disenchanted world merely is a very meagre world. However, it is this very discomfort, which motivates the quest for new enchantment’ (Dings 1994: 34 and 36). These sentences are written from a perspective in which the people who appreciate the new rituals appear to be imbued with nostalgia and bitter regret. The Dutch essayist and chess master Hans Ree ridiculed this kind of nostalgia: For at least a century, enlightened minds have rationalised and disenchanted the world. Now that the result seems to disappoint many, they would like to pretend it was all just a mistake, which may be cancelled by some pious recontemplation of old values… If the next ten years will actually bring continued philosophical consolation and recontemplation of old values, I expect a new wave of obligatory self-criticism, this time by those people who always have reported that Santa Claus does not exist, but in the meantime have come to realise they do not want to miss him. (Ree 1994) This ridicule hits the mark, I think. In addition, it points to the insufficiency of ‘disenchantment’ as an explanation. This longing for Santa Claus points not only to a lack of religious we-groups, but also to the fading of old we-groups like nation, class, race, and gender as providers of stable and secure we-feelings. In this sense, it largely arises from the same source as the longing for new rituals: the earthly ‘symbolic community’, the feeling of connectedness to the larger society has become unstable and insecure. The nation-state as a provider of large-scale we-group feelings has in particular become increasingly problematic and ambiva-

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lent. Accordingly, a national identity crisis is frequently observed, and ‘[a]t regular intervals, therefore, each citizen needs a safety valve for his longing for a sense of collective belonging, for solidarity. Apart from the Queen … in fact, only sports and music offer that possibility’ (NRC Handelsblad 26 May 1995).10 This suggests that, apart from secularisation, that is, diminishing religious we-feelings, another source of discomfort is the lack of stable, reliable, and large-scale societal we-feelings; there is a societal identity crisis or a solidarity crisis. In relation to mourning rituals, however, many people almost automatically think of the lack of old religious solidarity. And if in this context the concept ‘disenchantment’ is used, the discussion usually tends towards a nostalgic longing for this type of solidarity. Most nostalgic longing, however, is directed at least as strongly at other old feelings of solidarity. It is a romanticisation of the time in which a powerful and almost blind—that is, more or less automatic—identification with one’s own group, one’s own nation, religion, race, class, family, and gender prevailed: everyone still knew his or her place, and with a few happy exceptions, all ‘foreigners’ were still living abroad. Nostalgic complaints of this type can therefore be understood as a symptom of a more general regularity: every time some collective optimism turns into a feeling of insecurity, a wailing arises about the decline of ‘genuine cultural heritage’ and about the ‘shallowness’ and ‘decay’ in modern society (Waldhoff 1995: 58).

4.8 P  hases in Individual and Social Processes: Changes in the We–I Balance In the 1960s and 1970s, not many voices expressed this kind of nostalgic regret, and those who did were far from loud. In these years of collective emancipation and informalisation, most people still had a sense of belonging to an expanding social universe. They shared an optimistic

 For the importance of sports in this context, see Eric Dunning’s Sport Matters (1999). 10

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view of the future, an expectation of a widening range of behavioural and emotional alternatives. This came to an end in the 1980s, together with collective emancipation. From the early 1980s onwards, as feelings of discontent and insecurity spread, the longing for a more stable and secure we-group intensified. In the meantime, however, most of the old we-­groups—not just religious we-groups, but also groups like family, city, class, or nation—seemed to have crumbled or lost cohesion. They merely seemed to provide a rather limited and insecure sense of belonging, and the same goes for we-groups on a transnational plane, only more so. I-ideals and we-ideals seemed to have lost their harmony. This collective experience appears to have been a principal source from which the recent quest for new rituals has sprung. It is this thesis that deserves closer examination than presented in the following preliminary sketch— its outline is based upon Norbert Elias’s essay on changes in the we–I balance (2010b). Particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, Western states have gained strength, resulting in increasingly large military and police forces and a vigorous and unquestioned monopoly of state power. This development involved many processes, on a national as well as on an international plane. And in practically all these processes, the differences between people based on nationality gained importance in relation to other differences between them, such as those on a basis of class, region, or religion. Up to and during the Second World War, the rising power of states ran in tandem with a strengthening of national group identity, until the nation-state became the highest-ranking reference group for the we-identity of individuals. On the international and global plane, international competition between states contained strong incentives in that direction—particularly the forms involving violence. On the national plane, in processes such as internal pacification and integration of previous groups of outsiders into the state structure, individuals increasingly directed themselves to the established national code of behaviour and feeling. In this process, their we-identity in relation to the state strengthened and their scope of identification widened. This change was also stimulated by a costly technological innovation: the atomic bomb. In 1945, within two months after American atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Orwell pub-

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lished his ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ article, in which he coined the term ‘cold war’. He saw how ‘the possessors of the bomb [were put] on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue the world between them … in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours’ and that this was bringing ‘an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”’ (Orwell 1970: 26). This is the condition that in 1962, in a speech by Robert McNamara, was spelled out as Mutually Assured Destruction, abbreviated as MAD, and almost put to the test in the Cuban Missile Crisis. These changes implied a strong pressure on the we–I balance of individuals in the direction of the we. However, the pressure was towards the I as well, because the more highly integrated multiparty states offered greater personal freedom of choice and wider scope for self-control. Many relationships such as those between family members or between workers and employers became less of an obligatory, lifelong external constraint. Within limits, but to a growing extent, these we-relationships became voluntary and interchangeable, putting all the more emphasis on the I, on the decision of individuals about the form and continuity of their relationships. Thus, as chances for individualisation grew and demands on the capacity for self-regulation rose, the we–I balance was tilted towards the I. In sum, the we–I balance of most individuals changed in both directions; their we-identity widened and their I-identity strengthened. During and shortly after the Second World War, states of a new order of magnitude, the ‘superpowers’, the USA and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), moved to the top of the hierarchy, pushing the smaller European states with more limited military and economic resources into a second-rank position. Accordingly, their inhabitants’ old we-identity in relation to the state came under pressure, a pressure that was increased when these states lost their colonies. In processes of decolonisation, the we-identity of belonging (or not) to a kind of global ‘good society’—‘the West’ as the upper classes on the globe—was nascent. Under this pressure, more and more individuals and countries in the world took sides with one of the superpowers, which implied a widening of perspective, if not of identification. It was a spurt in the globalisation process. To a large extent, the implications of the weakened position of

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the European states for the we-identity of their individuals were warded off, mainly by concentrating on post-war reconstruction, on the expansion of industries and commerce, as well as on further national ­integration via welfare state institutions. All over the West, in increasingly dense networks of interdependency, relationships of co-operation and competition expanded and intensified. These processes contained increasing pressures on all those involved to widen their we-identification while at the same time offering rising chances for individualisation. Particularly from the early and mid-1960s onwards, entire groups were rising socially; there was a collective emancipation or, to put it differently, the most striking social pressure came from below. The 1960s and 1970s were decades of emancipation and resistance, in which a strong shift of the we–I balance towards the I took place. Relationships between political, administrative, and commercial authorities and their subordinates became less hierarchical and formal. As practically all relationships became less unequal and more open and flowing, even more of the we-­ relationships, which was once taken for granted would last a lifetime, became voluntary and interchangeable. The traditional submission of the interests of the individual to those of one’s group and its honour diminished further; most people were expected to have more individual means of defence at their disposal. They developed many different part-­identities, as well as the flexibility to switch swiftly between various situations and relations. Accordingly, the kind of identification with we-groups that is complete, blind, and automatic was substituted increasingly by more varied, more differentiated and also, to some extent, to wider circles of identification. As before, this shift in the we–I balance towards the I implied increasing demands on self-regulation: people came under increasing pressure to calculate and to observe themselves and each other more sharply, while showing flexibility and a greater willingness to compromise. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, only a few people experienced the increased demands on self-regulation as such, because in phases of emancipation and resistance the gains in terms of we-feelings and I-feelings are usually emphasised. What prevails is the feeling of liberation from the straitjacket of old authoritarian relationships. This was expressed in a strong ideal of equality and solidarity with the oppressed,

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in an almost taken-for-granted identification with rising groups of outsiders, and in a sense of belonging to an expanding social universe. Although only partly and vaguely attached to national and transnational organisations, these we-feelings and we-ideals had a wide scope. Some of them clearly crossed national borders and were shared across those borders, thus representing a shift in the we–I balance towards the we, a widening of the scope of identification. During these decades, it was on this basis that the fading and disappearing of old mourning rituals could be welcomed rather unproblematically: most people with feelings of grief did not experience great difficulty in finding a new symbolic community to connect to. This basis faded in the following decades. In the 1980s, collective emancipation chances disappeared and a ‘market ideology’ spread: the phase of emancipation and resistance turned into a phase of accommodation and resignation (Wouters 1986). When this phase gained dominance, the most striking social pressure came once again rather unequivocally from above. In the struggle for status and positions, people again came to depend largely upon themselves and their own capacity to cope with the pressures from above, and from all other sides. In this change of phase, the interests of organisations and of society at large came to prevail more often over the interests of individuals. At the same time, there was a collective change in we-identification—from identification with rising groups of outsiders to identification with the established, both on a national and a global scale. These phases can be connected to the twin processes of differentiation and integration of social bonds (Elias 2012b). In the phase of emancipation and resistance, differentiation has the upper hand, allowing for collective emancipation chances and a collective search for expanding behavioural and emotional alternatives. In the other phase, that of accommodation and resignation, the significance of co-ordinating and integrating social positions and institutions is in the centre of attention and interest, stimulating the longing for a more stable and secure sense of belonging and social codes. Thus, the changes in the we–I balance and the transition between the two phases are seen here as expressions of the underlying twin processes of differentiation and integration of social

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bonds, which together increase the length, density, and complexity of interdependency networks.11 In the 1980s, as working-class industries were closed in the West to be transported to cheap-labour countries, the sense of belonging to an expanding social universe changed into a feeling of greater uncertainty and insecurity. It opened a perspective in which the disintegration of old we-groups and the loss of old we-­feelings and I-feelings are emphasised. Voices expressing concern about the corrosion of social cohesion and solidarity became louder and more numerous. It was a concern about more encompassing we-ideals and we-identities, representing a shift in the we–I balance in favour of the we.12 But what we? The groups people refer to as we both had expanded and differentiated, resulting in a multitude of multileveled we-groups, we-identities, and we-ideals. The concern about social cohesion also revealed that many experienced difficulties in satisfying their longing to belong, particularly in the big way of belonging to a large and strong social unit. Identification with the nation-state was

 In his analysis of developments in sociology since 1945, Richard Kilminster (1998: 145–172) has distinguished the ‘monopoly phase: circa 1945–1965’, the ‘conflict phase: circa 1965–1980’, and the ‘concentration phase: circa 1980 to the present (?)’. The latter two phases correspond to the phases of emancipation and resistance and accommodation and resignation mentioned in my text at this point. For a theoretical discussion of phases in processes and a proposal to integrate chronology and ‘phaseology’, see Goudsblom (1996). 12  An interesting example of this shift in identification comes from a study of changes in letters to an agony column in a Dutch weekly in between 1978 and 1998 (Post 2000 and this reader, Chapter 10). The study shows that from the early 1980s onwards, we-feelings and ‘collectivism’ were expressed increasingly, both in the contents of the letters and in the causes mentioned for writing them. The study also shows that from the early 1980s onwards, more discontent was related to broad societal topics like the economy, employment, and criminality. A similar shift towards the perspective of a we-group was discerned in the new sources of discomfort mentioned. They included such broad, general, and abstract references as ‘the future’, ‘an indefinable sense of doom’, ‘life’, and ‘the world’. For a connection with the end of a phase of collective emancipation was no vocabulary, of course, nor for the threat to the global upper-class position of Europe and the West. 11

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strengthened, but in quite ambivalent ways as this type of we-identity also had become constrained and threatened. It was constrained by the continued perception of nationalism as a major incentive to large-scale annihilation and humiliation (this perception blurred with the rise of populism), and it was threatened by the pressures of rising international competition (as will be discussed later). In Europe, we-identity in relation to the state had also become ambivalent because at this stage the weakened position of European states in the world came to be realised more fully. In the sphere of the economy, lifetime jobs had largely become almost an anachronism. Identification with one’s organisation was restricted in accordance with the rising demands of flexibility. To some degree the longing to belong was satisfied by the formation of ‘neo-tribes’, as Maffesoli has called the rise of a multitude of small groups ‘with splintered but exacting intentionalities’, favouring ‘the mechanism of belonging’, yet fundamentally ‘unstable, since the persons of which these tribes are constituted are free to move from one to the other’ (1996: 83, 140 and 146).13 Yet although joining these groups, organised around the catchwords, brand names, and sound bites of consumer culture, did give a sense of belonging, they merely provided another part-identity. Robbed of the feeling of belonging to an expanding social universe and stuck with this feeling of insecurity, increasing numbers of people would appear to have come to experience their many part-identities, even the whole ‘postmodern orgy of community-chasing’ (Bauman 1992a: 199), as somewhat problematic. Particularly in ‘moments of life and death’, their longing for a more encompassing and secure sense of belonging was not satisfied, or only in part. In addition, the formation of part-identities that can be almost instantly and flexibly assembled and dismantled may well have increased the ‘freedom to move’, but in the 1980s this greater freedom was experienced increasingly as a pressure of having to comply with increased demands on self-regulation. Indeed, this greater freedom was at

 Maffesoli’s book The Time of the Tribes originally appeared in 1988. In contrast to my interpretation, he sees this rise of ‘neo-tribes’ as a decline of individualism in mass society: ‘The autonomy (individualism) of the bourgeois model is being surpassed by the heteronomy of tribalism’ (1996: 127). 13

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the same time a greater pressure to perform.14 In this social context, many people with feelings of grief will have experienced difficulties in finding a satisfying symbolic community with which to connect. For some, this lack will have served as a motive for starting or getting involved in a quest for new rituals. Involvement in this quest did not imply any decline in the importance attached to mourning as a personal psychic process. It did imply, however, a rising tension in the we–I balance of individuals, between their we-ideals and I-ideals. In the 1990s, the feeling that social cohesion and solidarity are lacking was intensified, and so was the feeling of insecurity. They intensified in reaction to the events that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain and other globalisation processes. These events implied changes, tensions, and conflicts—some violent such as in former Yugoslavia—from which perspective the period of the ‘Cold War’ and ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ suddenly seemed relatively stable. The existence of an ‘enemy’, a clear they-group, obviously had provided a we-group to hold on to. Now, that hold had vanished.15 In addition, nation-states did become quite noticeably involved in continental and global integration processes, from which perspective most national countries are in fact little more than regions within global

 These are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes, particularly if postmodernism is celebrated, the side of greater freedom is emphasised: ‘No authoritative solutions to go by, everything to be negotiated anew and ad hoc…’ and ideally ‘all structures … light and mobile so they can be arranged at short notice’ (Bauman 1999: 26–27). But whose ideal is this? Certainly not Michel Foucault’s, for usually his eyes are fixed upon the other side of the coin, that of the constraint to perform. In what he describes as the ‘new capitalism’, Richard Sennett (1998) has taken a position close to that of Foucault. Against those who claim that the new flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives, Sennett argues that the new order and ‘the new regime of time’ threaten to rob people of their feeling of social continuity and community; they threaten to ‘corrode his character, particularly those qualities of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self ’ (1998: 27). 15  Ironically, but not unrelated, shortly afterwards, the only remaining ‘superpower’ engaged itself in an intense long-lasting debate on the ‘disuniting of America’ (Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. 1992). 14

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networks of interdependency. Particularly in Europe, it increased the awareness that most nation-states, including one’s own, have but little control on the course of these processes. This feeling of powerlessness will have also been intensified by attacks on superiority feelings inherent to experiencing the West as a good society of global upper classes. On the one hand, this awareness has stimulated the formation of a we-­ identity in relation to humanity at large, to ‘human rights’ and international justice. It widened the scope of identification, as exemplified in a growing interest in activities of global organisations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organisation, and the World Trade Organisation, as well as in the growing support of global organisations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Plan International. This growing interest was in keeping with mounting pressures of international competition, which increasingly tended to curtail national sovereignty and to force nation-states in the direction of forming united states. On the other hand, however, the curtailing of national power and sovereignty, together with decreasing prospects and chances of having a say on the national as well as on the European and global level, became a source of intensified feelings of discontent, uncertainty, loss, and threat. This was expressed in many ways, for instance, via the detour of indicating groups of scapegoats like ‘foreigners’ and criminals to be excluded and respectively punished—creating new enemies as an attempt at creating the desired feeling of new communal solidarity.16 It was also expressed by crying out for more powerful state rule—governments and politicians are inclined to feed on this demand (Garland 1996). In the 1990s, concepts like ‘civil society’, ‘civic responsibility’, and ‘communitarianism’ also expressed this longing for a more encompassing and solid we-identity. The collective rise in popularity of these concepts practically all over the Western world may also be taken as an indication that the shift  For this reason, Sennett claims that the ‘we’ has become ‘the dangerous pronoun’. In a chapter with this title, he argues that ‘today, in the new regime of time, that usage “we” has become an act of self-protection. The desire for community is defensive, often expressed as rejection of immigrants or other outsiders’ (Sennett 1998: 138). 16

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towards continental and global integration has been relatively rapid in comparison to the pace of a corresponding change in the we-image, the we-identity of most people. For them, states have remained the highest-­ ranking reference group for their we-identity. Their ‘we-image, the whole social habitus of individuals, is immovably tied by a strong affective charge to traditional group identity on the plane of the nation state’ (Elias 2010b: 197). By virtue of its continuous tradition, this we-group grants individual persons a past stretching far beyond their personal past, as well as a chance of survival beyond actual physical existence—via one’s children and one’s we-group. Therefore, many people still experience the trend towards greater interdependency and integration as a threat to their we-image, their identity. They fear that absorption into a larger unit will lead to the fading of cultural traditions and collective memory. As Elias observed, with reference to examples such as the enforced incorporation of Indians (native Americans) into the USA, their defence against integration arises from the fear for a kind of collective dying. Indeed: As long as no feelings of personal identity, no we-feelings are associated with the higher-order unit, the fading or disappearance of the lower-order we-group appears in reality as a kind of death threat, a collective destruction and certainly a loss of meaning to the highest degree. (2010b: 201) The relatively slow change of the social personality structure, including I- and we-images, stands in the way not only of further continental and global integration, but also of the chances for developing a more harmonious we–I balance and for finding a more satisfying ‘symbolic communitas’. Particularly for the intense emotions evoked at ‘moments of life and death’, when there is an urge to share them with as large a we-group as possible, no such large we-group seems to be available. This feeling of lack, of an insecure and even a threatened we-feeling in ‘a society obsessed with health [which] is ultimately a society obsessed with death’ (Walter 1996: 81), may have stimulated the rise of many large, instantly formed ‘communities of mourning’. The growing number of large mourning processions and demonstrations since the 1990s may indicate an expanding reserve of people

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inclined to join such a ‘community of mourning’. The interest in Princess Diana’s funeral and enormous queues (in many countries) to sign books of condolence are well-known examples. The ‘White March’ in Brussels, after the killing of young girls, is another one. In the Netherlands, the killing of young people in street violence triggered several large memorial services and mourning processions and demonstrations. Massive collective mourning occurred in 2014, after a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board (almost 200 had Dutch nationality). These events triggered mass expressions of grief and lots of interpretations. Many observers took it for granted that most participants had covert grief about a personal loss: here was an ­opportunity to express grief in the big way they had longed for, a mass expression. Many saw them as manifestations of the need for a communal experience of grief in an individualised society: ‘in such a society, people immediately seize every opportunity to mourn collectively’ (Leclaire 1999). A more critical notice, entitled ‘pointless procession’, said: ‘by participating one obtains the feeling “I was part of it”. These gatherings provide the security of the masses… The demonstrators want their safe, old society back’ (Huygen 1999). A skeptical critique, entitled ‘pointless compassion’, interpreted these demonstrations as offering ‘instant commitment’ or the ‘fake fraternity of a mass gathering’, yet acknowledged them as ritual expressions of a new sense of community (Ritsema 1999). In sum, despite this tug of war around the new mass mourning ritual (reminiscent of the one around modern obituary notices), all seem to agree that these demonstrations provide the large ‘symbolic communitas’ that is felt to be lacking. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the internet came to provide a wealth of new communities for mourning. Soon, abundant options for online mourning, for sharing the experience of losing a loved one and of mourning their loss came into existence, grieving communities as well as communities of the bereaved. Both are differentiations of the informalisation of mourning. The online expression of grief will have helped offline expressions, and young people in particular have tended to express and discuss their feelings about death and mourning much more openly, thus including these feelings in a more general emancipation of emotions.

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4.9 T  he ‘Memento Mori’ Function of Public Debates on Euthanasia In addition to collective mourning gatherings, frequent and intense discussions in all Dutch media on euthanasia have functioned as repetitive and protracted memento mori warnings. By the end of the 1960s, ­discussions on ‘dying too late’ and euthanasia broke the regime of silence on death and dying. In the Netherlands the Dutch Society for Voluntary Euthanasia was established in 1973 for providing information, consultation, and education about euthanasia and assisted suicide. In 1978, a manual for doctors on how to administer euthanasia appeared, and in 1984, the first amendment to legalise euthanasia was proposed. A year later, the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG: Koninklijke Nederlandse Maatschappij voor Geneeskunst) published a framework that would make euthanasia an acceptable medical practice. In the early 1990s, Huib Drion, a Dutch Supreme Court judge, became one of the many important names in this history through his proposal that doctors should be able to provide medication to elderly people (over 70 years) and thus enable them to voluntarily end their own lives with a suicide pill. It had a strong appeal to the nation’s imagination and was soon discussed widely as the ‘Drion pill’. Euthanasia was legalised in 2002, but its legalisation did not end discussions in the media. Their function of calls to memento mori continued because behind each category of people that had been accepted as qualifying for being helped out of their life, a next wider category surfaced: from the terminally ill with unbearable suffering, to the suffering and chronically ill, to psychiatric patients with serious syndromes such as chronic depression, schizophrenia, autism, to those suffering from dementia, to the very elderly with a catalogue of physical defects and disabilities, to the very elderly without such a list of conditions and yet without anything left on their menu of life, to younger people who also feel they have nothing to live for. It was a long period of continued attempts at finding a clear dividing line in the bulk of people who are determined they want an end to their life—

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between those who come short of the latest legally defined conditions required for euthanasia and those who meet them. There was a sequence of people seeking the doctor’s help in ending their life, together with a sequence of debates in the media. It seems that these sequences will only come to an end when (a) people helping other people out of their life will no longer be liable to punishment, and (b) when a humane death will also become available without mediation or the assistance of a doctor.17 The dawn of this second possibility seemed near in September 2017, when Cooperation Last Will (Coöperatie Laatste Wil) announced to have a powder that, dissolved in water, can be ingested and cause a painless death within an hour. Again, it appealed to the imagination of the Dutch, in a way that is reminiscent of the ‘Drion pill’. This new ‘agent’ is on the market as a preservative, not a medicine, but the Cooperation only wanted to tell its name and sell to people who have been a member for at least half a year. Membership soon doubled, then tripled and reached 23,000 in February 2018. At the end of March 2018, the public prosecutor’s department announced the start of an investigation into whether the Cooperation should be punishable by criminal law, and a few days later the Cooperation announced to stop providing information about the lethal powder in order to prevent their clients from getting into a judicial danger zone. This is only a moment in the long development from a regime of silence on death and dying, still strong in the 1950s, to the present relatively high level of openness, trust, and gently living together with the dying and the anticipatory mourning (Armstrong 1987) involved in confronting death, both in public debates and intimate discussions. It shows a rather densely integrated society in which death and the dying have been increasingly included, and with rising degrees of societal recognition and support for those who mourn.

 For the presented sequence and large parts of this argument, see Bert Keizer (2018b: O4–O5). 17

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4.10 E  pilogue on the Need for a Modern ‘Memento Mori’ In a conversation with Collin Parkes, a well-known expert in mourning processes, a widow described the way she had to redirect her life after the death of her husband by using the metaphor of placing new tracks next to the existing ones. As time passed, she increasingly succeeded in following the new tracks, but small incidents could immediately set her back to the old ones (Bergsma 1994). This image of two co-existing tracks is also helpful in understanding developments in mourning, particularly the tug of war and ambivalence in the quest for new rituals. For children, rituals function as the old tracks, as points of recognition in the big and still largely unfamiliar world. They like to be put to bed in the familiar, ritualised way and then listen to the same familiar story. In a similar way, they learn the language and other rules of social intercourse: continually falling back on the routine of the old tracks. For a while, children live up to the newly learned rules in a rather rigid way. Only from the age of 11 or 12 onwards do they learn to apply the rules in more flexible and playful ways. This possibility opens up because, by then, they are also better able to take the feelings and experiences of others into account. On that basis, in dealing with this situation and that relation, they dare to improvise, and thus, they develop the playful earnestness of a ‘homo ludens’ (Huizinga 1974 [1938])—a ‘controlled decontrolling’. A similar sequence of ‘learning to control’ preceding the possibility of ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ can be discerned in the broad social processes of informalisation. The transformation from rather formal manners to more informal, flexible, and playful ones depended upon a relatively high level of integration of all social classes in welfare states. In these integration processes, people have increasingly pressured each other into more reflexive and flexible relationships, and at the same time towards a more reflexive and flexible self-regulation, changing the social code in the direction of the ‘homo ludens’ art of living. This implies the self-confident maintenance of a very light and subdued cheerfulness, in no matter what circumstances, which can only flourish to the extent that the sense of mortality has sunk in and the ability to endure feelings of powerlessness has been acquired.

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The quest for rituals that are attuned to this attitude to life, and enforce it, proceeds with difficulty. To religious people, the old rituals brought a feeling of belonging to a symbolic community in which all were connected via an imagined superhuman being under an extra-terrestrial dome. Some modern rituals do without such an image: we only have one life, and in it we have nothing but each other. To express this in modern rituals does not demand an extra-terrestrial dome, but a societal one of simple social recognition. However, contemporary state-societies hardly provide possibilities of finding this recognition. With regard to mourning, there are hardly any rules or customs, if any, which provide the appropriate societal dome. Today, nation-states offer mourners no framework for raising the ‘symbolic communitas’ that would meet their need to feel recognised in their loss. This suggest policies and practices aimed at establishing such a framework. They should offer opportunities for expressing some of the emotions surrounding dying and mourning, in ways that raise the feeling of connectedness to a large symbolic community, one that goes beyond religion. Such a policy would demonstrate an understanding of the quest for social solidarity, but also help to create and reinforce it. It could be developed at institutional and governmental levels. There are already many examples at the level of institutions—examples of people who gather to participate in some secular ritual in which they gather and share their common fate, a helpful exercise in enduring their feeling of powerlessness. However, institutional rituals offer only limited opportunity to express personal grief publicly and to acknowledge publicly an ongoing relationship between the people who have died and those who have been bereaved. As their organisation is restricted to nursing homes, hospices, and hospitals, they can be interpreted as institutional expressions ‘of the modern desire to sequestrate death away from the public gaze’ (Mellor 1993: 21). Examples above the institutional level, at the level of the city or the state, are scarce. Therefore, I want to conclude this chapter with a brief sketch of what could happen if the authorities of towns and cities would open the possibility for every dead person to have a paving stone or tile inscribed with the dates of birth and death. Such a public marking of highly personal and intense emotions would serve a multitude of societal

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interests. After a few years, there would be so many stones or tiles with an inscription that the memory of the dead—and by implication also the reminder of being mortal—had become a daily experience that had spread from the isolation of cemeteries to the streets of the city. In this way, the compartmentalisation of dying and mourning may end and the old regime of silence over them could be alleviated further. It would fill the obvious need for a modern and universal memento mori for all. A new track, in addition to the old one, would be created.

5 Informalisation, Functional Democratisation, and Globalisation

This chapter has its focus on changes in the relation between processes of differentiation, integration, and integration conflicts or disintegration. They are studied in an attempt to clarify the direction of the processes of civilisation, informalisation, and functional democratisation in the process of globalisation. The main question is whether there have been changes in the direction of these processes. The first two concepts of the title of this chapter, informalisation and functional democratisation, are connected to each other in a way that has not been formulated before. This connection throws new light on the wider framework of the theory of civilising and informalising processes, as well as on the processes themselves. Functional democratisation and informalisation relate to each other as ‘diminishing contrasts’ and ‘increasing varieties’, two key concepts in Norbert Elias’s synopsis of his theory of civilising processes. Each of these four concepts—informalisation, ­functional democratisation, diminishing contrasts, and increasing An early version of this chapter was published in Human Figurations 5 (2), July 2016.

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varieties—refers to processes that have been described as side effects of differentiation and integration processes. The title of the first section to this chapter is a formulation of these connections in one sentence:

5.1 F unctional Democratisation or ‘Diminishing Contrasts’ and Informalisation or ‘Increasing Varieties’ as Side Effects of Differentiation and Integration Processes In the first chapter of this book, three significant and interconnected process drivers of informalisation are suggested: the rise to critical levels of (1) competition and co-operation, (2) social differentiation and integration of social functions, and (3) functional democratisation in expanding networks of interdependency. Norbert Elias, who coined the concept of ‘functional democratisation’, presents it as closely connected to long-­ term processes of social differentiation and integration of social functions in which all groups and individuals have become increasingly interdependent, with the consequence of a reduction in power potentials between groups and a ‘diminishing of contrasts’ in conduct. The latter is a specific process of social equalisation via ‘civilisation’, through the ‘regularity of functional differentiation’ within the West, as well as in the colonisation of land outside of it: [W]hat is taking place before our eyes, what we generally call the ‘spread of civilisation’ in the narrower sense—that is, the spread of our institutions and standards of conduct beyond the West1—constitutes, as we have said, the last wave so far within a movement that first took place over several centuries within the West, and whose trend and characteristic patterns, including science, technology, and  Needless to add that this spread was at the same time a spread of colonisation.

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other manifestations of a specific type of self-restraint, established themselves here long before the concept of ‘civilisation’ existed. From Western society—as a kind of upper class—Western ‘civilised’ patterns of conduct are today spreading over wide areas outside the West, whether through the settlement of Occidentals or through the assimilation of the upper strata of other nations, just as the models of conduct earlier spread within the West itself from this or that upper stratum, from certain courtly or commercial centres.2 I will interrupt this lengthy quotation to direct attention to Elias’s reference to ‘courtly and commercial centres’, because later in this chapter I will focus on these centres and on changes in the balance of power between them. They are important because they are a continuation of the processes in which warlords and then courtiers became increasingly dependent upon people in the world of finance, industry, and commerce. During the era of colonisation, the expansion of ‘functional differentiation’ in the West to areas outside of it proceeded from both centres, but in comparison to commercial ones, the powers emanating from Western political centres clearly remained dominant until the era of decolonisation. Without a powerful army and navy, the competition for land to colonise could not be successful, and the manufacture and transportation of colonial products also needed to be protected by guns and gunboats. Near the end of the process of decolonisation and early into the postcolonial era, the balance of power between the political and the commercial centres shifted in favour of the latter, particularly in areas where decolonisation combined considerably with pacification, and especially since the end of the 1970s when a deregulation of capital markets coincided with the transportation of whole industries from the West to cheap-­labour countries such as India and China. The dominance of the competition for land shifted to a competition for money, and the dominance of the powers of ‘land lords’ or aristocrats shifted to the powers of ‘money lords’ or ‘moneycrats’, while both powers became more strongly interdependent. This chapter is an

 On the next page (425), Elias writes ‘in some respects, as noted above, the Western nations as a whole have an upper-class function…’ 2

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attempt to provide an explanatory sketch of this interweaving as well as the shifting dominance in their balance of power since the 1980s. Now back to the quotation. Elias continues by hammering out the point he is building up to, that functional differentiation, functional democratisation, and ‘the spread of our institutions and standards of conduct beyond the West’ cannot be understood through reductionism: It is not ‘technology’ which is the cause of this change of behaviour, what we call ‘technology’ is only one of its symbols, one of the last manifestations of that constant foresight imposed by the formation of longer and longer chains of actions and the competition between those bound together by them. Civilised forms of conduct spread to these other areas because, and to the extent that, through their incorporation into the tangle of interdependences whose centre the West still constitutes, the structure of their societies and of human relationships in general is likewise changing within them. Technology, education—all are facets of the same overall development. In the areas into which the West has expanded, the social functions with which the individual must comply are increasingly changing in such a way as to induce the same constant foresight and affect-control as in the West itself. Here, too, the transformation of the whole social existence is the basic condition of the civilisation of conduct. For this reason we find in the relation of the West to other parts of the world the beginnings of the reduction in contrasts which is peculiar to every major wave of the civilising movement. (Elias 2012a [1939]: 424) The whole section from which this is quoted—Section 3: ‘Diminishing Contrasts, Increasing Varieties’ in ‘Overview: Towards a Theory of Civilising Processes’, Part Four of On the Process of Civilisation (2012a: 422–427)—can be read as an example of ‘functional democratisation’, although Elias did not coin this concept before 1970. In this section of his book, Elias connects (1) the ‘mechanism of competition and monopoly’ with the (2) ‘regularity of functional differentiation’ and predicts (3) declining differences in power and conduct, thus reflecting specifics of the three process drivers of informalisation:

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Western people, under the pressure of their own competitive struggle, … are making large parts of the world dependent on them and at the same time—in keeping with a regularity of functional differentiation that has been observed over and again—are themselves becoming dependent on these parts. … Largely without deliberate intent, they work in a direction which sooner or later leads to a reduction in the differences both of social power and of conduct between colonists and colonised. (p. 425) Thus, Elias recognises the social inequalities that were generated by colonisation and almost in the same breath predicts their decline via functional democratisation. In this way, he builds up to the following summary: ‘The contrasts in conduct between the [currently] upper and lower groups are reduced with the spread of civilisation; the varieties or nuances of civilised conduct are increased’ (p. 426; italics in original). As discussed in Chapter 1, many of the examples and processes brought together under the conceptual umbrella of ‘informalisation’ can be interpreted and explained as ‘increasing varieties’. I mentioned this in my 1976 article, ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’ Apparently, the processes of informalisation and functional democratisation are directly connected, rooted as they are in the same transformation of a whole social existence. They relate to each other as processes of formalisation and informalisation and as ‘diminishing contrasts’ and ‘increasing varieties’ within the same movement of the civilising process: It was at small functional centres that the foresight, more complex self-­discipline, more stable superego formation enforced by growing interdependence, first became noticeable. Then more and more functional centres within the West itself changed in the same direction. Finally, in conjunction with their pre-existing forms of civilisation, the same transformation of social functions, and thus of conduct and the whole personality, began to take place in countries outside Europe. This is the picture which emerges if we attempt to survey the course followed up to now by the Western civilising movement in social space as a whole. (p. 427)

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An additional argument, relevant for understanding what was to be summarised later in the concepts of ‘diminishing contrasts’ and ‘functional democratisation’, is that, with the differentiation of social functions, an ‘open or latent ambivalence’ emerges in all human relationships. And this, as I will argue in greater detail in Sect. 5.4 of this chapter, is a ‘basic ­condition of the civilisation of conduct’ which at least partly explains why the level of functional democratisation can also rise together with functional differentiation in dictatorships or, in more general terms, in expanding networks of interdependency that are not ruled according to democratic principles. The term ‘functional’ as a prefix to ‘democratisation’ is used in contrast to ‘institutional democratisation’. ‘Functional democratisation’, or the lessening of power gradients and of social inequalities, is not related to the institutions of a democracy, but they result from the blind long-term processes of differentiation and integration of social functions of various kinds (economic, political, affective, sexual, etc.) that people perform for each other and that link them together in the interdependency networks of their survival groups. This theoretical framework of connections that makes up the theory of civilising processes was drawn up in the 1930s, but until he died in 1990, Elias did not think that the processes of differentiation and integration of social functions, or those of functional democratisation, had stalled or changed direction. On the contrary, he saw them change in the same direction. This is quite evident, for example, in his 1987 essay on the we–I balance, which featured in the previous chapter of this book. The process of informalisation has also continued in the same direction since the 1880s, although there is evidence of its continuation as a spiral process of alternating short-term phases of informalisation and formalisation, the latter consisting mainly of formalisation of previous informalisation, in a word: reformalisation. In the 1980s, the strong wave of informalisation in the ‘Expressive Revolution’ was followed by a phase of reformalisation. Reformalisation, however, is not a change of direction but a consolidation and integration of previously informalised conduct and steering codes (Wouters 2007, chapter 6). In the twenty-first century, processes of functional democratisation, informalisation, and reformalisation continued in the same direction, but

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as they differentiated further, focusing clearly on them became somewhat complicated because of a strong advance in globalisation processes. This apparently did not coincide with functional democratisation, at least not in the wealthier West, while China and India were booming. The advance in global differentiation and integration processes was ­accompanied by changing balances of power both within and between countries as well as between the world of money, involving functions that provide material security, and the world of politics, involving functions that provide physical safety via taxation. Since the 1900s, in addition to these complex processes, declining national and continental inequalities have coincided with a globally declining percentage of people living in extreme poverty: in 2013, according to World Bank studies, 10.7 per cent of the world’s population lived in ‘extreme poverty’, that is, on less than (inflation-­ corrected) US$1.90 a day, compared to 35 per cent in 1990 (http://www. worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview). Changes like these further obscured the view on trends and counter-trends—whether they can be interpreted as ‘functional democratisation’ on a global scale remained difficult to assess. Yet it seems obvious that, at present, processes of differentiation and integration of social functions are continuing on a global scale to an extent that obliges all who study them to develop and maintain a global perspective. It was in this context that Stephen Mennell launched the concept of ‘functional de-democratisation’, first in his The American Civilising Process (2007) and later in two articles (2014a, b). He raises the following key question, at least implicitly, if not explicitly: Have the processes of functional democratisation and informalisation changed direction? It is impossible to answer this question without knowing the extent to which these processes have extended to a global level. And it is also significant to establish whether, where, and to what extent the processes of social differentiation and integration have stalled, come to an end, or changed direction. This chapter aims to address these questions. In an earlier article on ‘Informalisation and Social Stratification from Global Perspective’ (1990c), I addressed very similar questions, although I did not use the concept of ‘functional democratisation’. On the one hand, that article

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departs from the connection between social equalisation or the decrease in institutionalised power differences, that is, in social stratification, and the spread of informalisation in the West. But on the other hand, it departs from the ‘debt crisis’ and ‘the many who speak of an increasing gap between rich and poor countries’. This paradox provoked several questions: What are the factual processes from which this increasing gap between rich and poor states can be diagnosed? And to what extent will such a trend prevent a global process of social equalisation and informalisation from becoming dominant? Will the trend towards ‘diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties’ between classes … continue on a global scale between states? What are the chances that the structured changes in the West will spread to the global level? These questions demand a comparison of the development of the relationships between the classes in the West and that between rich and poor states on the planet. (Wouters 1990c: 70) This chapter extends from that article, but it seems appropriate to mention a major difference between 1990 and now: the serious consequences of globalisation for Western labour markets have since become increasingly clear and they were underestimated at the time. I have also raised and answered the question in my 2011 article, ‘How Civilising Processes Continued: Towards an Informalisation of Manners and a Third Nature Personality’, but because the evidence used was based mainly on studying manners books published in four Western countries since the 1880s, the answer was mainly restricted to Western developments. However, if these questions are addressed from a global perspective, in addition to informalisation and functional democratisation, two other side effects of social differentiation and integration come into view: integration conflicts and disintegration, including defunctionalisation. Here, I will focus first on the introduction of the concept of ‘functional democratisation’ because it is often misunderstood, as we shall see from the example of how ‘functional de-democratisation’ was introduced.

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5.2 T  he Introduction of Functional Democratisation and Its ‘Counterpart’ Elias introduces this concept in What is Sociology? (2012b [1970]) and he presents it as a cornerstone of his theory. The context is polemical.3 The ‘overall social transformation’, he writes, continuing his old fight against reductionism, ‘is usually labelled by only one of its aspects’, such as ‘industrialisation, scientification, bureaucratisation, urbanisation, democratisation or the growth of nationhood’ (59).4 Without a model of their interrelations, he claims, conceptual divisions such as these will lead sociology astray. The same goes for mentally dividing societies into economic, political, and social spheres, for these divisions obstruct the possibility of overcoming ‘the sociological problems posed by the common direction of development in many state-societies’. This direction ‘has to be brought to light not just in one sphere but in the all-pervading transformation of human relationships’ (59–60). A helpful question relating to this transformation is ‘What overall change in the structure of each of these societies has caused the ruling strata of previous centuries to decline in power in relation to the social heirs of those who were often referred to as the common herd?’, and another question: ‘Why societies oligarchically ruled by the hereditarily privileged were transformed into societies ruled by the recallable representatives of mass political parties?’ (2012b [1970]: 60–61). In What is Sociology? Elias discusses the trend towards reduction of power differentials in the first two sections, distinguishing a reduction between rulers and ruled, and between different social strata. At the end of these two sections he introduces the concept of functional democratisation, but only after pointing to an inherent regularity, an unintended side effect that damages people, their functions, and power ratios:

 This context, and all the quotations used, can be found on the last seven pages (59–65) of the second chapter of What is Sociology? 4  Elias starts by re-humanising these de-humanised concepts; for example, ‘industrialisation ultimately means nothing more than that more and more people came to be occupied as entrepreneurs, white collar employees and manual workers’ (60). 3

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[A]gain and again in the course of social differentiation and corresponding integration, certain social groups have suffered reductions in the scope of their functions, and even total loss of function; the consequence has been loss of power potential. But the overall trend of the transformation was to reduce all power potentials between different groups, even down to those between men and women, parents and children. This trend is referred to by the concept of ‘functional democratisation’. It is not identical with the trend towards the development towards ‘institutional democracy’. It refers to a shift in the social distribution of power, and this can manifest itself in various institutional forms, for example in one-­party systems as well as in multiparty systems. (63)5 With the next sentence, opening section three, Elias highlights the importance of ‘this trend’, writing: Central to this whole social transformation have been impulses towards growing social specialisation or differentiation in all social activities. Corresponding to these have been impulses towards integration of the specialised activities—integration that has often lagged behind the differentiation. (…) Because of their particular specialised functions, all groups and individuals become more and more functionally dependent on more and more others. (63–64) In section 4, Elias focuses on two types of intellectual orientation—the scientific and the ideological—that have usually developed in close association with this transformation. Referring to the structural properties which enabled people to become aware of themselves as societies, he writes:

 At times, functional democratisation is misunderstood as equivalent to institutional democratisation. For example: ‘functional democratisation, a process in which more and more categories of people gain access to political arenas where they can pursue their functional interests and settle disputes were, instead of engaging in violent political struggles to achieve these means’ (Weenink 2013). 5

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Paramount among them is functional democratisation, the narrowing of power differentials and development towards a less uneven distribution of power chances; it permeates the whole gamut of social bonds, although there are impulses simultaneously running counter to this trend. (64–65) After having introduced ‘functional democratisation’ in What is Sociology?, Elias continues to use the concept, but with little clarification and at times almost casually, without reference to what he describes as ‘central to this whole social transformation’: the ‘growing social specialisation or differentiation in all social activities’. For example, when writing ‘the thrust towards diminishing the power gradient between rulers and ruled, between the entire state establishment and the great mass of outsiders’ (2013a: 34), he no longer explains why this democratisation is ‘functional’. It then apparently turns into ‘the equalising process’, usually along with hints at impulses and processes ‘simultaneously running counter to this trend’. These quotations from Elias introducing functional democratisation reveal he is open to part-processes of disintegration that accompanied functional democratisation and social integration. Accordingly, he takes care to present both equalisation and its counter-trend, for example by first drawing attention to social groups that suffered reductions or even total loss of function and power potential, before writing: ‘but the overall trend of the transformation was to reduce all power potentials between different groups, even down to those between men and women, parents and children’ (63). Thus, he clearly presents ‘functional democratisation’ as a balance concept (see Chapter 6), raising the question of how strong the impulses and processes towards increasing social inequality have actually been, and specifically to inquire which people and groups in fact ‘suffer reductions or even total loss of function and power potential’. Only by using a balance concept like this is it possible to grasp that as interdependency networks expand and become denser, both social equality and inequality tend to increase, and that ‘functional democratisation’ is compatible with increasing social inequality. As the differentiation of social functions and organisations proceeded and demanded more and

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higher levels of integration, decreasing inequalities via functional ­democratisation is one side of the coin. They also increased if only because the co-ordination and administration of multilevelled social organisations implied a longer and steeper hierarchy, and usually also because some people and their groups ‘suffer reductions or even total loss of function and power potential’. The key question is, which side becomes dominant—equalisation or its opposite? And questions that would help to avoid short-sightedness are: Which side is dominant from a short-term perspective, and (also) from a long-term perspective? Furthermore, which side is dominant in its scope for action and its corresponding levels of integration and complexity? The importance of these questions is highlighted by Elias’s entry on ‘social processes’ in which he calls universal progress a myth. He grounds this remark in the example of ‘weapons and tools, which gave a particular society advantages in struggles for survival with other groups and with non-human nature’, but ‘groups which did not adopt them were defeated and disappeared. In retrospect’, he adds, ‘people see only the apparent smooth progress of technology, and not the elimination struggles behind it, which consume human beings’ (2009c [1986]: 8). In tacit agreement with Elias, Eric Dunning writes polemically about Émile Durkheim, whose analysis of the division of labour contains a fundamental flaw that derives from his failure to recognise that functional interdependence or division of labour does not lead necessarily to harmonious and co-operative integration but is conducive, even in its ‘normal’ forms, to conflict and antagonism. In short, his concept of the society based on ‘organic solidarity’ is Utopian. (Dunning 2008 [orig. 1979]: 216–217) In his book on The American Civilizing Process, in a section entitled ‘Functional de-democratisation’, Stephen Mennell draws attention to the twentieth-century trends towards social equalisation and informalisation, [which] from some standpoints may appear the dominant feature of the last century. In the counterpoint of history, however, they can be interwoven with contrary trends. Elias paid less attention to the pos-

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sibility of what may be called functional de-democratisation and its effects. Yet in his writings and those of subsequent researchers who have followed his lead, there are important clues as to the genesis and consequences of functional de-­democratisation. (2007: 311) However, the ‘important clues’ mentioned by Mennell remain uninvestigated. He abstains from further clarification and proceeds by discussing ‘identification with the established’ and related insights of Elias’s model of established-outsider relationships. While he does refer to ‘increasing disparities in wealth and power’, Mennell does not specify the relation between these disparities and the italicised concept. At the end of his discussion of the ‘economic crisis’ since 2007–2008, Mennell (2014a) again raises some points of criticism or clarification about Elias’s ideas, particularly about … the confidence he often expressed that the overall trend of human society was towards longer chains of interdependence, which would tend to bring with them relatively more equal power ratios between the various links in the chain—‘functional democratisation’. (2014a: 2) From this view—a one-dimensional or one-sided one, as I will clarify— Mennell jumps to the conclusion that when it comes to today’s expanding interdependency networks ‘in important respects the big picture is of functional de-democratisation’. In an even stronger formulation, he concludes: ‘on the larger scale, there are very powerful forces of functional de-democratisation at work.’ Again, these ‘powerful forces’ remain unclear. Instead, he references a change in the dominant viewpoint in economics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s which came to offer ‘an ideological justification of “Greed is Good”’, while ‘the invisible hand’ translated into ‘everything is permitted’ and used as an excuse for bypassing responsibility for foreseeable externalities or wider social consequences. Together with the assumption that was dominant until 2008, that (financial) markets are ‘free’ in the sense of having an equal distribution of power chances, these established views in economics, according to

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Mennell, allowed for increasingly uneven power ratios between rich and poor social classes as well as between rich and poor countries. Drawing attention to ‘the financiers and their political allies’, who ‘increasingly see the need neither to pay their taxes nor to compare their remuneration with that of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen’, Mennell argues that balances of power between upper and lower strata ‘appear to be tipping back in favour of the more privileged, and global interdependences are increasingly interwoven with countries’ internal power ratios’ (2014a: 12). In his article ‘Globalisation and the “American Dream”’, Mennell uses Elias’s term ‘polyphony of history’, commenting that Elias ‘would not have been surprised to find that early in the twenty-first century alongside continuing strands of functional democratisation there is evidence of the growing strength of the opposite: what I have labelled “functional de-democratisation”’ (2014b). He then goes on to provide evidence of ‘increasing inequality in America’, as if that would justify this ‘label’. The observation that increasing global interdependence coincides with growing inequality in nation-states seems accurate, at least in some states. But Mennell only backs this up with a rather casual moral argument, and by deploying Elias as a source of authority in an attempt to legitimise his ‘label’, which serves to disguise a lack of explanation. Mennell’s ‘correction’ of Elias suggests he is standing on the great sociologist’s shoulders, but because he does not clarify what he means by de-democratisation, or what is ‘functional’ about it, he merely treads on Elias’s toes. Many questions remain unanswered. In what sense is this de-democratisation functional?6 And if it is the counterpart of ‘functional democratisation’, as Mennell claims, should it not be called ‘defunctional de-­democratisation’? How and to what extent is this concept related to rising social inequality, and on what scale do these processes occur? Is it really ‘the big picture’, or is it mainly big in the USA? These questions are not raised, thus rendering Mennell’s perspective more myopic than global. In his presentation of ‘functional de-democratisation’ as a concept, Mennell ignores the possibility that, as industries, capital, and commerce  Many thanks to Stephen Vertigans for this observation.

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were moved to cheap-labour countries, functional democratisation continued on the corresponding higher (global) level of integration, while being accompanied (also or particularly) in expensive-labour countries with defunctionalisation, integration conflicts, and disintegration. The continuation on a higher integrative level implies that the question regarding the dominant direction of these changes—whether they represent a trend towards social equality and/or social inequality—only makes sense if it is raised and answered from a global perspective. To what extent has functional democratisation continued on a global level? And where and how was the spurt of globalisation accompanied with defunctionalisation, integration conflicts, and disintegration? Seen from the global perspective of the ongoing and encompassing global intertwining of functional interdependency networks, an explanation of the rise of social inequalities such as those in the USA in terms of a shrivelling of these networks is inconceivable. In fact these networks continued to expand across the globe, increasing in strength and density, changing the balance of power between all parties involved, including the balance of power between the world of commerce and the world of politics. Since the rise of social inequalities cannot be explained by shrinking networks of functional interdependency, we must look for an explanation elsewhere. To link the dubious concept of functional de-democratisation to the rise of social inequalities, suggesting that it has similar explanatory power as its counterpart of ‘functional democratisation’ is a theoretical mistake that comes mainly from Mennell’s one-dimensional view of the connection between lengthening chains of interdependency and social equalisation. It is one-sided for the same reason that Eric Dunning criticised Durkheim, which is that it turns a blind eye to the flip side of differentiation and integration processes: the unintended side effects of integration conflicts and disintegration processes, including defunctionalisation. It seems clear that functional differentiation and integration processes have not reached a relative stability on a higher integrative (global) level, and that it remains difficult and therefore disputed to establish whether or indeed when a further step in the processes of functional democratisation and informalisation becomes dominant. But for the same reason it is also clear that it is premature, incorrect, and confusing to interpret the

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rise of social inequalities in large parts of the rich Western world in terms of ‘functional de-democratisation’. Long-term processes of expanding interdependencies do not by definition lead to decreasing power differences, neither should we expect them to do so with necessity or certainty, or immediately or automatically. This is simply a possibility, one that would occur over a long period. They may also lead to integration conflicts and to processes of disintegration and defunctionalisation involving large groups of people. Therefore, the theory and analysis of functional democratisation and informalisation calls for a sharp focus on levels of integration as well as levels of disintegration and on the tension-balance between the two. Both emerge as side effects of the differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity of social functions. They are ‘side effects’ because, seen from the perspective of ‘big history’ and human history as a whole, the processes of differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity have developed in the same direction, and thus remained dominant process drivers. It is important to integrate part-processes of disintegration, defunctionalisation, and integration conflicts into a theory of long-term functional democratisation because both trends—decreasing inequalities via functional democratisation as well as increasing inequalities via defunctionalisation and disintegration—have occurred throughout human history as two unintended side effects of social processes of differentiation and integration.

5.3 P  rocesses of Integration with Part-­ Processes of Disintegration and Defunctionalisation as Unintended Side Effects: Examples on Various Levels From the earliest management of fire and agrarian production, human organisations have expanded and become increasingly interdependent via differentiation and integration of social activities or functions. Some groups have lost their power potential because they lagged behind in the specialisation or differentiation of functions and/or because they could

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not make their social organisation strong and competitive enough to prevent them from losing power and survival chances. In these processes, whole survival units—including state societies— apparently lost functions (or defunctionalised) to the extent that they became or were perceived to become what are known today as ‘failed states’. Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan are examples. From this perspective, the present refugee crisis—most refugees in Europe have fled these three countries—is an example of part-processes of disintegration and defunctionalisation as unintended side effects that damage people, their functions, and their property. Elias writes about the defunctionalisation of priests, knights, kings, and ‘the defunctionalizing of the family by the state’, and he also presents a more general statement: A defunctionalisation of existing specialisms can be observed again and again in the course of social development. They may be restricted to specific enclaves of the structure of social functions as in the case, for example, when handloom weavers are defunctionalized by factory production using mechanical looms […] It may comprise the whole function-structure of an integrated social unit […]. In the territories of the former Western [Roman] Empire, this trend towards the contradiction of differentiation, towards the defunctionalization of previously existing specialisms reached its high point in the early feudal societies. (Elias 2009d [1977]: 29) However, on the whole, among the groups that survive, defunctionalisation and growing inequalities did not rise to dominance over ‘functional democratisation’—the growing equality that accompanies the expansion and strengthening of interdependency networks. As all groups and individuals became more and more functionally dependent on more and more others, all people bonded in such a network will become less inclined to use violence for solving conflicts or to use other forms of constraints that would disturb the mutual interests of their bonds, including hierarchical ones, as these interests and bonds will have found a well-­grounded place in their survival unit. They provide a sense of belonging in combination with a certain protection against loss of material security and physical safety. They tend to become a taken-forgranted part of the group’s culture, its members’ social habitus.

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Despite counter movements such as the disintegration of the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages, processes of differentiation, integration, and functional democratisation have been dominant over the whole of human history, and with renewed strength and clarity from the sixteenth century onwards. In Europe and the Middle East, they continued in more or less the same direction, taking the course of state formation processes in which ‘private’ leaders of survival units such as war lords and knights became courtiers. From the courts the ‘private’ royal functions of managing the monopolies over the use of violence and taxation were gradually or by revolution transformed into the bureaucratic public functions of state institutions. It was an institutional democratisation, a transformation from private to public: state monopolies transferred into the hands of an increasingly wider public. However, from a somewhat wider perspective it was also a process of functional democratisation, as shown by what happened in states such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, or France. Particularly in the nineteenth century, Elias writes, they saw ‘a strong advance of functional democratisation integrating practically all classes into the state structure’, and these developments ‘brought a deep-rooted predisposition of the individual personality structures of people of all classes to live together in this specific form, as Danes, Dutch or French’ (Elias 2010b: 196). Processes of functional democratisation have continued and permeated various parts and layers of people in various ways and degrees. Indeed, eventually, on the whole and in the long run, some of this functional democratisation has permeated every detail of the interdependency networks in question. In that sense, it was an all-pervasive process. At present, so many processes of integration and disintegration can be observed simultaneously that observers often find themselves equipped with little means to appreciate which are more or less significant than others. On closer inspection, I think it seems plausible that differentiation and integration processes within Western nation-states and their national economies have been dominant and have increasingly achieved broader, more encompassing levels. In the course of reaching an international and then global level, differentiation and integration processes have simultaneously triggered integration conflicts and disintegration processes. From this perspective, even World War II can be understood as

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an integration conflict that disintegrated Europe at first, but which later integrated Germany within Europe. A few simpler examples will probably be more helpful to illustrate my point. The first example is from a late phase in Western national integration processes in which the welfare state and its institutions emerged and spread national incomes more equally among its citizens. The result was a significant decline in the fear of poverty and the spread of an ‘equanimity of the welfare state’ (Stolk and Wouters 1987a; Wouters 2007: 214 and 223). Welfare state organisations enabled women and young people to feel and act more independently of their husbands and fathers—a clear example of functional democratisation: on the level of the state all citizens became more interdependent and at the same time, many became less subordinate to their former (male) superiors. On the other hand, as the authority of the latter diminished, the volume of voices bemoaning and complaining about this loss increased, claiming the disintegration of traditional family life and whole families falling apart. At present, examples of integration processes that trigger integration conflicts and part-processes of disintegration are related increasingly to what David Riesman et al. (1950) would have conceptualised as a transition from tradition and inner-directed cultures and personalities to other-­ directed ones. From the perspective of a balance between formalising and informalising trends, I have focused on the integration conflicts and tensions between people living in countries where the phase of formalising manners and emotion regulation is still dominant, as opposed to those in countries where informalisation has spread. In my book Informalization (2007: 206–208), I compare an example of a global integration conflict from 1995 with Western examples from the 1920s and 1930s. This global integration conflict refers to a national campaign in Vietnam against what were called ‘negative foreign influences’. ‘American cultural imperialism’ in particular was considered a serious threat to ‘traditional morals’. In the 1920s and 1930s, many European authorities used similar language. A Dutch government committee, for instance, warned against the ‘demoralising Americanisation of Europe’. The threat was disparagingly referred to as ‘instinctual life’ with ‘primitive feelings’. Both the Dutch authorities in the inter-war years and the Vietnamese authorities in the 1990s took disciplinary measures to prevent the population becoming

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‘estranged’ or ‘alienated’ from tradition and forming a treacherous union with ‘strangers’ or ‘aliens’ and their more informalised lifestyle. These examples of high-handed attempts at defending ‘traditional morals’ can be extended globally by pointing to groups such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State which feed on the same cause (see Chapter 8). The social costs of these integration conflicts are clearly vast. Another example of integration processes that trigger integration conflicts involves the merger waves that have swept through most Western countries since the 1960s and 1970s (Wouters 1990c). Whether on the level of towns and cities, schools and universities, or business firms and corporations, again and again the same story can be told from the perspective of integration and functional democratisation, as well as from the perspective of disintegration or defunctionalisation. When I tried to explain these two perspectives to a friend, a personnel manager who had witnessed a tidal wave of mergers between academies, colleges, and schools, he could easily provide examples of how, in the process of merging, independent schools and colleges lost cohesion and solidarity. ‘In the transition, the life and soul of these organisations was often severely damaged’, he said, ‘and you could sense it all over the place, in the teachers, the students, and in their relationships’. Most of them were mourning the loss of their old we-identity, and they rejected the possibility of identifying with the higher-level organisation as a sort of ‘treason’. As a side effect of integration, part-processes of disintegration can unintentionally damage or break social functions that people have performed for each other in a preceding phase of development. Such a loss of function can be experienced by them as the extinguishing of a significant source of what gave meaning to their jobs and their lives. As the chains of interdependence reached the periphery of the world, at the level of nation-states many citizens in the European Union also feel a loss of their old we-identity. They feel they have lost (too) much of their former independence and this hurts their national pride; they seem to be in a state of mourning, anger, or both. They are hesitant or even repugnant towards identifying with higher organisational levels than the nation-state, and they would rather cling to their national territorial borders and symbols. These feelings and longings are acknowledged by most political parties, mostly populist ones. As long as the

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we-identification of people in these states remains predominantly on the level of their n ­ ation-­states and continues to hamper the development to higher organisational levels such as the European Union, this limited orientation and identification will continue to diminish the power chances of all political parties and governments, particularly when compared with the growing power chances of social organisations governing the world of finance and global corporations. Even when populists win, take over the government, and decide to leave higherlevel organisations such as the European Union, they may have increased their power chances nationally but decreased and hampered their spread internationally. From the 1980s onwards, as capital, commerce, and whole industries continued to be moved from Western countries to cheap-labour countries, this global trend was accompanied with defunctionalisation, integration conflicts, and disintegration, not only in countries with cheap labour, but also in those where labour is relatively expensive. As a rule, defunctionalisation and the like in rich countries attract more attention from the West than when it happens far away from it. These are common manifestations of an identification with the established we-groups of the West as a kind of global upper classes. Eurocentric or occidental manifestations of such an identification are commonly formed and expressed in defence against expanding and/or rising groups of local and global outsiders. Among the established, the feeling of being threatened by outsiders often triggers them to close ranks, thereby reinforcing their position as part of a globally established upper class of rich countries and rich people. This defence mechanism of the established, to close ranks, often functions unwittingly, as it does in many forms of populism. It also functions unwittingly in dealing with subjects such as global warming and climate change: many people are not aware of their Occidentalism as they congratulate themselves on advances towards decreasing their ecological ‘footprint’ on the world, fully oblivious to the ecological costs of both outsourcing the production of goods to the other side of the world and transporting finished products back to the West. From a global perspective, this ‘hidden impact’ means that if the ‘external effects’ or the global ecological costs of their lives and their lifestyle are included, Westerners are still increasing their ‘ecological footprint’

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across the world. In her book Hidden Impact, Babette Porcelijn presents the example of ‘hidden energy’: Rich Western countries have transferred many of their production facilities to low-wage countries such as China and India. The plants used in these countries use lots of energy to make stuff for our markets. Energy in the supply chain is not included in energy labels nor on your energy bill. This energy is invisible to us, the energy is hidden from our view. We import these things and therefore we finance hidden energy without knowing it. So, part of the national energy consumption in production countries should be on the tab of wealthy countries. (Porcelijn 2016: 34) This ‘hidden impact’ can only be revealed from a global perspective. The analogy with functional democratisation and disintegration is clear: only from a more detached view of the ongoing global intertwining of social functions does it become possible to see the extent to which interdependency chains expanding on a global level coincide with rising social inequalities, defunctionalisation, and integration conflicts in the West, while in other places they coincided with some disruptive integration conflicts and with functional democratisation. From this broader perspective, it seems possible and probable that continued global intertwining is connected with centrifugal (disintegrative) tendencies in some places as well as centripetal (integrative) trends in others. Therefore, looking at the world as a whole, an overall global trend of functional democratisation remains dominant. Hence, it is important to understand the long-term trend of functional democratisation—and whether it has lost or gained dominance—from the larger framework of rising levels of differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity, and to study the extent to which these processes have functional democratisation as well as disintegration and integration conflicts as their side effects. Questions relating to which trend is dominant, or whether processes of differentiation, integration, and functional democratisation have stalled, come to an end, or even changed direction, need to focus on both equalising and/or de-equalising side effects. Looking at ‘big history’ and human

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history as a whole, the life processes of differentiation (competition), integration (co-operation), and increasing complexity (synthesis) have remained dominant as process drivers. From such a broad perspective, constituting parts of these life processes can be discerned and ordered according to differences in balances of power and levels of differentiation and integration.

5.4 G  rowing Interdependence Triggers an Ambivalence That Reduces Power Potentials Between Groups: Functional Democratisation In his book on the process of civilisation, Elias claims that as networks of social interdependence expand and their links multiply and increase in density, ‘a specific duality or even multiplicity of interests manifests itself more strongly’ in the relations between individuals as well as between different functional strata. In this argument, Elias describes the open or latent ambivalence that I think is crucial for understanding and explaining functional democratisation: As social functions and interests become increasingly complex and contradictory, we find more and more frequently in the behaviour and feelings of people a peculiar split, a co-existence of positive and negative elements, a mixture of muted affection and muted dislike in varying proportions and nuances. The possibilities of pure, unambiguous enmity grow fewer; and, more and more perceptibly, every action taken against an opponent also threatens the social existence of its perpetrator—it disturbs the whole mechanism of chains of action of which each is a part. (352–353) At this point Elias presents an example that is especially interesting because he writes this in the mid-1930s, when Hitler and the Nazis were in power and he himself was in exile. After stating that ‘with the growing

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division of functions, the relations between different power units become increasingly ambivalent’, he continues: The relations between states in our own time, above all in Europe, offer a clear example of this. Even if integration and the division of functions between them have not yet advanced as far as the division of functions within them, every military exchange nevertheless so threatens this highly differentiated network of nations as a whole that in the end the victor finds himself in a seriously shaken position. He is no longer able—or willing—to depopulate and devastate the enemy country sufficiently to settle a part of his own population in it. He must, in the interest of victory, destroy as far as possible the industrial power of the enemy, and at the same time, in the interest of his own peace, try within limits to preserve or restore his industrial apparatus. (353) Elias goes on to sketch the potential winnings of such a war—‘colonial possessions, frontier revisions, export markets, economic or military advantages’—and then drives home his point that because in the struggles of highly complex societies, each rival and opponent [each nation-state] is at the same time a partner on the production line of the same machinery, every sudden and radical change in one sector of this network [of states] inevitably leads to a disruption and changes in another’ … The inevitable conflicts grow increasingly risky for the whole precarious system of nations. However, through these very tensions and discharges the figuration moves slowly towards a more unequivocal form of hegemony, and towards an integration, perhaps at first of a federative kind, of larger units around specific hegemonic centres. (353) At this point, Elias continues his account by drawing social classes into the picture, arguing that the relationship between different social classes within a dominion becomes, with the advancing division of functions, more and more ambivalent in the same way. Here, too, within a far more restricted

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space, groups whose social existence is mutually dependent through the division of functions are struggling for certain opportunities. They too are at one and the same time opponents and partners. There are extreme situations in which the existing organisation of a society functions so badly, and the tensions within it grow so large, that a large portion of the people and classes within it ‘no longer care’ (…) Up to this revolutionary situation, the classes bound together by the division of functions are cast back and forth between their split and contradictory interests. (…) the hour of the strong central authority within a highly differentiated society strikes when the ambivalence of interests of the most important functional groups grows so large, and power is distributed so evenly between them, that there can be neither a decisive compromise nor a decisive conflict between them. It is a figuration of this kind to which the term ‘royal mechanism’ is applied here. (353–355, italics in original) People with functions in the world of politics and those with functions in the field of commerce and money are also opponents and partners at the same time. Particularly in the nineteenth century, the balance of power between them was clearly in favour of those representing the rising power of nation-states. They also offered chances and set limits to those representing the world of money, until the latter exceeded national boundaries to a degree that tilted the balance of power more and more in their favour. At present, after four decades of this ‘globalisation’, there is an ongoing crisis in the world of politics. But this is not a ‘revolutionary situation’ and the world seems far removed from the ‘hour of the strong central authority’, and the contours of a global ‘royal mechanism’ remain vague. However, for many people in the West, these words will also have a ring of the past, for in the fields of politics and economics and as citizens of states, relations of power and dependency between them have come to be distributed so evenly while becoming so complicated and dense that they take it for granted that neither a decisive compromise nor a decisive conflict between them are viable options. They live with levels of interdependency in which virtually all have learned to assess and negotiate their own and each other’s ability to live and operate as opponents and partners simultaneously. To a large extent, this has become a normal tension-

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balance in their lives. Thus, this balance functions largely unknowingly as an important driving force behind their further developing the sensitivity and ability that is increasingly required in their ongoing status competition (Wouters 1992, 2011, 2014a). The revolutionary option as a viable solution has practically disappeared. Revolutions and other decisive ways of escaping the ambivalence that comes with relatively equal power relations are reminiscent, therefore, of rather rigid status-ridden social relations: people who share a strong fear of slippery slopes (Wouters 2012), and other characteristics of a second-nature type personality structure. More and more people now live in much closer social and psychic proximity to each other (Wouters 2007, chapter 4). From childhood on, they develop a higher level of mutually expected self-restraints, learning to be less rigid and more open about their ambivalences, and even playing with them in informal ways, thus releasing many inherent social and psychic tensions. In the era of informalisation, relational codes of mutual respect and equality have spread, while the relatively recent threats of global warming and mutually assured destruction (MAD) have added to these pressures, facilitating an identification with humanity as an undivided whole.

5.5 Decolonisation as an Example of Functional Democratisation As differentiation and integration processes became dominant on a global level, the processes of functional democratisation and advancing ambivalences also continued on that level. On an international and global scale, the mechanisms of competition and interweaving continued to operate, increasingly involving each and every state or dominion in global processes of differentiation, integration, growing complexity, functional democratisation, and informalisation. A significant moment in the expanding global network of interdependencies emerged when both competition through the accumulation of land and colonialism came to an end. To varying degrees, decolonisation also spread to the countries ‘behind the iron curtain’ with the collapse of the USSR. Politically autonomous nation-states then became the globally accepted dominant standard of social organisation, a rule proven by

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the exception of the ‘failed state’, a concept that refers to a place where the state does not function ‘normally’ and where individuals and groups ‘suffer reductions or even total loss of function and power potential’. To a large extent, decolonisation can be understood in terms of functional democratisation. Within the political and economic interdependency networks, functional differentiation had proceeded to a point where the desire for political democratisation was able to find political expression. After World War II, European colonial empires were exhausted and anticolonial superpowers were competing for support in former colonies. The expansion of global networks reached a critical density, implying a functional democratisation that forced up ‘the price of violence’ as well as ‘the value of a human life’. In the postcolonial era it became less likely simply to settle conflicts between nation-states by violent means such as dispatching armies or gunboats. Bombing from planes and drones is still considered and practised by those who think that bombing can win the battle, for example, in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. These wars, particularly the first two, centred on the ideological fears and dreams attached to the communist and capitalist power blocks. They were symptomatic of the global shift from a colonial competition for land towards an ideological competition for the best social organisation to provide a ‘good life’ in terms of freedom, equality, and wealth. From the collapse of the USSR and the rise of a capitalist communism in China, the ideologies of the main power blocks lost much of their significance and distinctiveness, thus unveiling the bare competition for power with greater clarity. Global competition revealed itself increasingly as a competition for commercial, industrial, and financial powers—so much so, that the conclusion of a widening gap between nations and states in the world is based on the criterion of income only. If that comparison were also based on the balance of power and human dignity, then the fact that between the 1940s and the 1980s colonialism came to an end would entail the conclusion that the gap between rich and poor nations has also diminished. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the spread and intensification of restraints on international military intervention added favourable conditions for internationally operating commercial and financial enterprises. A similar pacification process had occurred in an earlier era when territories were pacified internally and thus became nation-states. It was

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one of the major favourable conditions for commerce, industry, and finance to prosper on a national scale. Now, over extended pacified territories, the competitive struggle for the accumulation of money continued and intensified on a global scale. It was the global extension of the process in which the balance of power in court societies had increasingly shifted from the aristocracy in favour of the functional and commercial bourgeoisie. In the postcolonial era, this shift extended from nation-­ states to the world at large, providing higher levels of physical safety as well as material security to an increasingly wider public. Simultaneously, violence receded to some extent as a means of settling conflicts on a national, international and global scale, while the means of money advanced. This also means that, in comparison to people who provide material security functions, those who provide physical safety functions have lost some of their former power and glory, or so it would seem in a pacified, rich, and materialistic world in which virtually all eyes are focused on money and its discontents.

5.6 O  n Processes of Social Differentiation and Integration: The Force of the Competition and Interweaving Mechanism In Elias’s perspective on international relations and on the pervasive force of constraints at higher levels of differentiation, integration, and complexity, the division of social functions proceeds on the ‘production line’ of ‘machinery’ driven by the unremitting ‘mechanism of competition and monopoly’ (Elias 2012a: 353). This may sound rather mechanistic and too absolute, since a monopoly is not decisive in enabling this movement. What is decisive is a growing density and an expanding range of interdependency networks through the interweaving of human functions and activities. Therefore, I came to the conclusion (in Wouters 1990c) that this mechanism is more adequately conceptualised as ‘competition and interweaving’ because ‘competition’ can be understood as the major driving force of differentiation, while ‘interweaving’ can stand for inte-

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gration. Thus, the processes of ‘competition and interweaving’ are connected conceptually with those of ‘differentiation and integration’. In the commercial world as well as in the field of politics, competition (differentiation) and interweaving (integration) have been and continue to be major processes. Early on in the era of industrialisation, by the success and expansion of their businesses, private owners of enterprises were required to delegate to others more and more of the functions that originally, according to Fritz Croner’s ‘delegation theory’ (in fact, a theory of the origin of capitalism), were performed by owners themselves (1962, 132–133). This specific kind of division or differentiation of functions resulted from the expanding size of enterprises, from their bifurcations, and from the increasing complexity of the economy. ‘In 1850, threequarters of the funds listed on the London stock exchange market were government bonds. The same applied in Paris and Amsterdam. Stock exchanges were as yet of little significance to private companies’ (Heilbron 2005: 8). The processes of competition and interweaving (differentiation and integration) continued, particularly in the long wave of globalisation from the 1870s to 1914, and again after World War I until the Great Depression. After World War II, this trend was continued until more and more private ownership in the rich West was transformed into shared ownership via saleable shares on stock markets, thus creating a widening gap between owners or investors and entrepreneurs, comprising an increasingly wide variety of managers and CEOs. Also in the world of politics and diplomacy, the present trend of competition and interweaving towards an increasingly global system of interdependent nation-states seems undisputed. In the words of Johan Goudsblom: No one who is not bewildered by short-term fluctuations can fail to recognize this trend leading to ever more extensive social formations, controlled by ever more encompassing centres monopolizing the means of organized violence. That these growing monopolies are not immediately stable goes without saying. (1983) If we take the longer-term view of many centuries from this perspective, even major violent conflicts such as World War I and World War II

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become ‘temporary fluctuations’ in the long-term development of nation-­ states and their regimes of manners and emotion regulation. This view is also in keeping with the results of my study of changes in these regimes in four Western countries since the 1880s. I concluded that ‘World War II functioned predominantly as a catalyst. Arguably, in terms of changes in the codes of manners and emotion regulation over the twentieth century, both major wars and their aftermath seem to have had little effect on the overall trend’ (Wouters 2007: 173). I remember using the words ‘little effect’ and ‘little independent lasting effect’ hesitantly and reluctantly because of the obvious and lasting effect of Nazi brutalities on their victims, survivors, and their descendants. This realisation made it difficult to acknowledge that the atrocities of two big wars of the twentieth century had ‘small significance for overall developments in regimes of manners and emotions’. To do justice to the horrors of violent periods such as the two World Wars is only possible, of course, by zooming in on the atrocities. Looking at the significance of these periods within long-term processes, however, demands a relatively high level of detachment, which may arise from zooming in and out, by studying events alternately from a smaller and a greater distance. In this way, their place can be seen from a short-term perspective as well as from a long-term perspective, including a view on the moment when time stood still in horror as well as on the partial and passing moment of decivilisation. As long as the first view dominates and the second remains painful, mourning and/or shame will prevail. In which case, the long-term perspective may lose so much validity and meaning that it meets with moral indignation. Any attempt to perceive and do justice to both presents a serious problem to the balance of involvement and detachment because it could trigger sometimes incompatible identifications and strongly conflicting emotions. Yet, the act of zooming in and out involves a central function for all human emotion regulation as well as a central task for all social science: to maintain a tenaciously high degree of identification with both the established and the outsiders, as we-groups and they-groups, on all levels and moments in the history of our lives, and in the context of humanity amid all other life on earth.

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5.7 O  n the Shifting Balance of Power Between Politicians (Physical Safety) and Business People (Material Security) We do not have to zoom out far to see that we still live in the postcolonialist period, just past the early stages of the ‘Anti-Colonial Revolution’. Particularly after the end of the Cold War, this became increasingly apparent: processes of competition and interweaving had entangled nearly every state in global interdependency networks. In some parts of the world, former colonialists had become the established powers in large states such as the USA, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand, states that now more or less counted as belonging to the West, while the original inhabitants of these established colonialist states were marginalised as outsiders on their own lands. Representations of formerly colonised peoples by the former colonisers followed the pattern of established-­outsider relations according to which the identity of the outsiders in the view of the established is usually modelled after its minority of the worst and the identity of the established is modelled after its minority of the best. In processes of decolonisation, romanticised as well as demonised representations of both colonised and colonising people were attacked, for example by Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963 [1961]) and Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978). The pressure of attacks resulted in a differentiation of representations in the direction of ‘decreasing contrasts, increasing varieties’, but they did not disappear—far from it, as the balance of power between the formerly colonised and colonising peoples is still very unequal. Yet, competition and co-­operation between and among states and industries have exerted pressures in the direction of increasing global interdependencies, generating two questions: The first question is comparative, and it stems from earlier processes of state formation in which the earlier ‘private’ control over the state’s provision of physical safety via the monopolies of taxation and the use of violence came into the hands of an increasingly wider public: Have competition and interweaving processes in the world of money devel-

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oped to an extent where their function of providing material security are also shifting from private to public? The second question: Have social functions in the world of finance and commerce expanded with greater force and rapidity in the last half a century compared to the world of politics and diplomacy? (Kapteyn 1996; Blomert 2012). As businesses grew during industrialisation, private ownership was increasingly transformed into shared ownership: issuing shares was another step towards the shift from a private to a more public operation of many social organisations providing material security. A further move in this direction took place in many European states in which national income was shared via taxation and the reallocating principles of welfare state institutions. In the formation of welfare states, the provision of physical safety and material security to some extent intermingled and contributed to the expansion of both the world of politicians and government and the world of business people and finance. It was a period of economic growth in which the ‘powers’ of the world of commerce, industry, and finance, as well as those in the field of politics, were rising. Then, the two largely evened each other out because the power balance arena was still restricted largely by national boundaries and also because of negotiated agreements between political parties and workers unions through which governments could use ‘the right to work’ to pressurise entrepreneurs and their industries (Blomert 2012). Until the 1970s, the balance of power arena hardly exceeded the magnitude of single nation-­ states.7 And most of the richer states still had a complex established regime to regulate commerce, industry, and capital. During the 1980s, many of these regulations were softened and/or changed in favour of the ‘free market’. In 1983 an administrator of the  This can be confirmed by an example taken from my thesis of 1971, in which I observed a trend towards monopolisation on the basis of increasing numbers of ‘giant multi-national businesses’. I added that the economy page of a Dutch national newspaper, De Volkskrant, mentions that an estimated 500 of these giants exist. In 2016, about 60,000 trans-national corporations with about 500,000 branches were spread across the world (Kordos and Vojtovic 2016: 152). 7

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World Bank commented: ‘The new gods are the free market and private enterprise; the new devils are governments and planning agencies’.8 The 1980s saw power ratios shift from a favourable climate for national politicians in the direction of a more favourable national and international commercial climate, along with the neo-liberal politics of competitive deregulation. As the growth of trade and industry coincided with a deregulation of capital markets, increasing numbers of people were subjected to its ‘iron laws’ in a wave of company takeovers in the USA starting in the 1970s. Increasing international waves of mergers and takeovers signalled a newly prosperous global and globally organised world of money which penetrated and to some extent came to dominate the political world, both on a national and a global level. Merger waves and other integration processes were rapidly increasing to international and global levels, for example, by global enterprises transferring labour-intensive production processes to countries where labour was cheap and plentiful. In these low-income and low-wage countries the transfer was welcomed for the opportunities it brought, providing work and raising income, but it also placed these countries in competition with each other. Similar processes occurred on a global scale, as governments in poor countries came under rising competitive pressures to enforce the kind of policies that would attract companies and capital investors (Wouters 2007: Appendix 1). Since the 1990s, relatively poor nation-states in eastern EU countries came to function as low-cost labour centres, and in the process their governments were increasingly drawn into a competition for western European capital and investments, resulting in spirals of decreasing taxes on the profits of multinational corporations and increasing restrictions on labour unions.9 The importation of ‘market civilisation’ (Gills 1995; Linklater 2012) was part and parcel of ‘the disciplinary force of the market’ (Haskell 1985: 561).

 Prof. I. van Dam in NRC Handelsblad, July 1, 1983, also quoted in Wouters 1986. 9  Anthropologist Don Kalb in an interview with Dirk Vlasblom: ‘Het Oosten van het Oosten is woedend’, NRC Handelsblad, 8 May 2017: 16. 8

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Since then, particularly from a global perspective, the field of politics apparently lags further and further behind the world of money, particularly with regard to integrating their social functions to higher levels. This can be understood from the fact that politicians, particularly in complex democracies, are always highly dependent upon their constituents and the people running a large number of highly complex democratic institutions, and they will have to please them in order to be (re)elected and remain in power. In comparison, the people running commercial, industrial, and financial businesses are far less restricted in how they run their companies, and to some extent they are able to escape geographical limits to their activities by moving their money and their companies to more profitable places in the world. Politicians are unable to do this, of course—they cannot serve their constituencies from abroad, and in addition, they are bound to their country for reasons of ‘state security’. The rise and spread of public welfare-­state institutions may have appeared to many as the completion of national differentiation and integration processes, but functional ­differentiation remained firmly restricted to the internal affairs of nation-­ states. Their inter-relationships—their ‘foreign policy’ or ‘external affairs’—were held in the hands of an oligarchy of national politicians, if only ‘for reasons of state security’ (cf. Elias 2010b: 205–206). This is another reason why the integration of the field of politics increasingly lags behind that in the world of money, and why the taken-for-granted framework and point of departure for politicians in discussing topics related to processes of differentiation, integration, and democratisation have continued to be the nation-state or groups comprising them. ‘State security’ was also a way in which powerful countries such as the USA and the UK ensured their national power politics would prevail over international rights by ignoring the United Nations (UN) and breaking agreements made within this global institution by going to war in Iraq—a demonstration of might-is-right in a display of ‘shock and awe’. Their policy backfired because no weapons of mass destruction were found, and therefore ‘state security’ was not an issue, but it also backfired because by violating and breaking the symbolic unity of the UN, they significantly lowered its power and status. The war diminished the chance of

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enlarging the power of this global organisation of politicians, and it also hampered the development and rise of an oligarchy of international politicians that could advance additional global regulations that could prevent violations of ‘state security’. In addition, it reduced the chances of developing a policy that would set limits and rules to the power of the global oligarchy of commercial and financial ‘aristocrats’, or ‘moneycrats’. When the USA and the UK pushed the UN aside and invaded Iraq, they also affected the balance of power between the world of politics and the world of money in favour of the latter: in the absence of a strong global political organisation and a corresponding global political oligarchy, the finance oligarchs could play off the oligarchies of national politicians more easily against one another. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) came to a similar position of decline. Early in 2018, President Trump abused a WTO treaty by appealing to ‘state security’ as a legal basis for announcing the imposition of  heavy tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium to the USA. This ­neo-­mercantilist policy is indicative of how Trump runs the USA: as a business corporation, and thus he undermines the operation of the WTO. Pascal Lamy (former Euro-commissioner and director-general of WTO) admitted ‘the necessity of preparing for plan B: a WTO without the USA’ (NRC Handelsblad, 10 March 2018). George W.  Bush and Tony Blair, and later Donald Trump and Theresa May (and their supporters) are seeking to address nationalist concerns by challenging the dominance of global interdependencies. Meanwhile, Chinese political and commercial oligarchs expand their global presence. This exemplifies how people in the fields of money and politics intermingle on a global scale. It also shows how the common interests and power sources of business people and finance oligarchy around the globe increased to the extent that many people came to believe that ‘what is good for the economy, is good for the nation’. National interests were increasingly understood in terms of economic interests, particularly in the USA: ‘It might be an exaggeration to say that the American government is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business—but not much of an exaggeration’ (Mennell 2014b), and even less since President Trump.

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In the 1980s, managing money was becoming an industry in itself. More and more private citizens became investors: ‘In the 1970s, about 400,000 people invested in stocks and shares in the Netherlands; by 2000, just before the decline of the market, the number had risen to almost two million’ (Heilbron 2005: 5). Institutional investors such as pension funds and mutual funds flooded the stock markets and became ‘the dominant force in the functioning of financial markets as well as in the development of large firms’ (Heilbron 2005: 3). This brought about a collectivisation of private stock ownership; it did not result so much in ‘pension fund socialism’, but rather in a rise of shareholder power and an ‘investor capitalism’ that is based on ownership, not entrepreneurship (Heilbron 2005: 14). Investor capitalism is characterised and driven by managerial shareholder activism and hostile takeovers. The short-term motive of these takeovers—to get as much money as possible out of shares—often dominates more long-term entrepreneurial motives. Company managers who fail to base their business orientation consistently on shareholders’ interests were put under serious pressure: [They] saw their share prices fall, increasing their vulnerability to a takeover. Dependency on the stock market forced the management to adapt to the new balance of power, and many top managers did so by securing better pay and protection. Provisions for golden parachutes in the event of dismissal, together with share and option plans were soon standard elements of managers’ contracts. With pay dependent on share prices, the interests of top management and shareholders coincided far more than before, and increasing shareholder value came to prevail over other company objectives. … For professional investors the important thing is not so much to determine which shares have the highest return, but to find out which shares are likely to be most popular with other investors. (Heilbron 2005: 16) Thus, the popularity contest that is deeply rooted in American culture— and explained from America’s relatively open status competition in the absence of central good society, with good-society functions such as regulating social mobility and status competition (see Wouters 2004,

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2007)10—has now penetrated further, deep into the stock market and American capitalism. While the watchdogs of big-business managers have shifted from the pressures of compromise negotiations with governments and labour unions in the 1960s and 1970s to the watchdog pressures of shareholders from the 1990s on, governments and unions have receded into the background. ‘The global market is on a rampage. It needs to be tamed,’ says Pascal Lamy, former member of the European Commission (1999–2004) and Director-General of the WTO (2005–2013). And he continues, ‘Who can do that better than Europe? We have a tradition of civilising, we are that tradition’ (NRC Handelsblad, 25 March 2017). Perhaps, but a more important question is, how to proceed from here? From a global perspective, both the management of international affairs and the increasingly public operation of state institutions appear limited, because the differentiation of nation-state functions has stalled

 The following quotations will give an impression: ‘Wide use of exaggeration and superlatives is symptomatic of uncertainty of rank, of porous and changing social dividing lines. This characteristic is connected in explanatory ways to the process-continuity of the absence of a unified and centralised good society. In the USA, a relatively open competition between a large variety of centres of power and good societies, and also a stronger reliance upon supervision and other forms of external social controls have formed a barrier to the development of lower-pitched or subtler forms of expression and negotiation… Open competition and its related status-striving may also explain why Americans are more directly and more openly concerned with social success in terms of popularity. In American etiquette books, manners and popularity are closely linked. The manners books from the other countries under study use the term “success” or “social success” in the sense of gaining respect and appreciation, but the term “popularity” is entirely absent. The close link in American manners books seems to be another symptom of relatively high status insecurity and status consciousness’ (Wouters 2007: 160–161). For how ‘dating as a way of courting soon became a contest for popularity, producing a peculiar mixture of competitive conformity’, see Wouters, Sex and Manners, 2004, here: 94), with advice such as ‘The intelligent girl does not have to “pet” to be popular’ (Wallace 1941: 179). See also Willard Waller’s ‘The rating and dating complex’ (1937) and Beth Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat (1988). 10

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and the management of international affairs lags behind compared to the management of commercial and financial international affairs. There, differentiation and integration processes have achieved global dominance, a trend that was accompanied by integration conflicts and part-­ processes of disintegration, for example when possibilities for organising labour unions were curbed before a critical degree of their acceptance and their formalisation was established, which resulted in an absence or stark reduction of unions and the exploitation of workers (see Wouters 2007: 221–225). The financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009 is another manifestation of this type. At the same time, both examples exemplify the tensions and conflicts between the world of politicians and governments, on the one hand, and the world of commerce, industry, and finance, on the other, in which representatives of the latter have gained the upper hand. Their advanced level of integration has created favourable power chances for elites in the world of commerce and finance. These people have not experienced a loss of social functions or a loss of their significance or influence. In fact, the opposite has occurred, and they clearly demonstrate this by flexing their muscles and displaying various forms of superiorism11: demanding and allowing each other extraordinarily large salaries, buying or bribing politicians, playing poor nation-states against each other, forcing international treaties and legal constructions to curb the power of entire states, evading taxes, and by absolving themselves of responsibility for the ‘externalities’ of their activities. Together, these activities can be understood as indicating a reversal of democratisation, and a shift in the balance of power between the world of politics and the world of money in favour of the latter—in this specific sense, it is a de-­ democratisation or movement away from the legitimacy of elected officials. It seems likely that finance oligarchs have been able to get away with their excesses for such a long time because so many people have contin-

 The concept of ‘superiorism’ brings all the isms such as racism, sexism, ageism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and so on, onto a higher level of generalisation, highlighting their common characteristic: equating power superiority with superiority as a human being (see Wouters 2007: 219–220). 11

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ued and still continue to identify with their success. They did so during the long period after decolonisation and pacification had turned large parts of the world into areas fit for economic enterprise: from the end of the 1970s to the crisis of 2008–2009, which did not seem to change much. Differentiation and integration processes in the world of politics, whether national or international, continued to lag behind those in the world of finance and commerce.12 The damage caused by the crisis was less for those who ‘identified with the established’, compared to those who ‘identified with outsiders’ (which was so prominent in the 1960s and 1970s). In prevailing manners and attitudes towards the lower classes and other groups of ‘outsiders’, there was a shift in the carrot-and-stick balance towards more ‘stick’ and less ‘carrot’. Marginalised groups were treated with less consideration and respect and with stricter social control. Outsider groups such as children in residential care, for example, were met with ‘subsequent increases in formal social controls, punitive measures and populist support for further restraints’, which was ‘indicative of fears of a potential surge of new criminals, and crime being committed by the demarcated outsiders’ (Vertigans 2015). In the near future, only small changes can be expected in the balance of power between groups of ‘the established and the outsiders’ (Elias and Scotson 2008), whether local, national, or global. An example of such a small change at the national level is drawn from the Netherlands, where a law was passed in 2013 to cap the salaries of senior people working in government services and semi-public organisations, financed or subsidised by the taxpayer. Since then, these salaries were prohibited by law to exceed the salary of a government minister. The motive behind the implementation of this law involved a scandal surrounding a large number of people in semi-public organisations earning more than the Prime Minister

 The Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a treaty between the USA and the EU in the tradition of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1946) and the WTO (WTO 1995), was criticised for promoting the interests of big corporations at the expense of EU democracies. Trump had other objections and the treaty is shelved. 12

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of the country. This clearly demonstrates how the standards from the world of commerce had deeply infiltrated and amalgamated with the world of politics. In less than 40 years since 1980, people in the world of politics and public services had appropriated some standards of the business world and lost some of the old-established pride of public servants, who would not even think of ‘stealing’ taxpayers’ money by negotiating a salary well above their political ‘masters’. In the process, they have created a considerable income disparity between themselves and both politicians and the majority of civil servants whose terms and conditions have gradually been weakened.13 The law limiting top salaries in the world of politics aimed to disentangle both standards. Publications such as the Panama and Paradise Papers may have a similar disentangling effect on a larger scale. There has also been a rise in civil groups and social movements of people who are alarmed at the weakening ability of state politicians to curb TransNational Corporations (TNCs) excesses and so they organise protests such as product boycotts. In March 2018, a bonus that increased a Dutch bank manager’s salary by 50 per cent to over €3 million was cancelled after loud public outcry. Similar minor changes such as these may gradually add up and become part of a more encompassing trend in the direction of greater public control over the private governance of capital via national laws and international regulations. In many European nation-states, the privatisation of police tasks and services to ensure physical safety and property protection is a trend in a different yet related world, one that moves in a similar direction: under state supervision, protection is provided by (sometimes armed) personnel hired for a price. A large industry of security guards, security services, or protective services has been spreading since the 1980s, together with alarm systems and camera protection. With the spread of festivals, carnivals, pop concerts, football matches, and similar large events, the usual police protection and crowd control came to be replaced or supplemented by private professionals, hired from private organisations—a trend in a direction that could be called ‘para-militarisation’.  The business world probably served as a model because there, an income disparity between senior business executives and the workforce was growing in a similar manner. 13

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The USA has private standing ‘armies’ working in their service, usually abroad, and here, because the monopolisation of the use of violence by the state has traditionally been less advanced than in European nation-­ states, hiring the services of armed personnel for guarding property and/ or safeguarding people has been part of a longstanding tradition. The same goes for other countries with relatively lower levels of pacification and a protection industry functioning to guard the material and physical well-being of those with sufficient financial means but not enough political influence to warrant protection by the thinly spread state forces. In the USA as well as in Latin America, a lower level of pacification can be recognised, for instance, by a relatively large number of middle-class people living in gated and guarded communities and condominiums. In Europe, particularly in its richer nation-states, the protection industry has been spreading at national levels, and here, this ‘para-­militarisation’ is theoretically and empirically significant not only for its demonstration of rising social controls on self-controls but also of a high and taken-for-­ granted level of pacification. Only where the abstinence of using violence for solving conflicts is to a large extent assumed can this regulated deregulation become possible. It is an informalisation of previous standards of formalisation, a controlled decontrolling of the state’s monopoly of violence. Physical safety (from violence) is connected with material security (through money) in many ways. In countries where people have developed a high, taken-for-granted level of pacification, they have also developed a higher sensitivity to anything that threatens or is perceived to endanger their established level of physical safety and material security. Hence, they become increasingly sensitive to perceptions of risk that require privatised security measures. Except for those who can easily afford to buy private security, everyone is now caught in this upward spiral of para-militarisation and they tend to feel increasingly threatened in maintaining their level of material security. Thus all the established people who (can) keep up with this type of competition become increasingly inclined to de-identify with individual members of outsider groups and to practice and support stricter external controls on these ‘losers’. With these words I do not mean to suggest that I take one side or the other, the side of physical safety or material security. But they do help to

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make the theoretical and empirical points that a more substantial integration of both worlds seems likely and that the governance of global issues and conflicts increasingly faces pressures towards expanding global governance. From a still wider perspective, the structure and force of these processes of differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity of social functions are strikingly similar to the processes of differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity at the level of biological evolution, and the same conclusion is obvious from Chapter 2 on ‘Informalisation and Evolution’. It means that the driving forces of competition and interweaving are operative in both biological and social processes.

5.8 Where Are We Now? My account of changes in global balances of power, equality, and wealth highlights integration processes, on the one hand, and integration conflicts and disintegration, on the other. On the global level, there are no indications to suggest that processes of differentiation and integration of functions, or the competition and interweaving mechanism, have stalled or cease to operate. On that level, they are likely to continue in the same direction. They are also likely to be more advanced in the world of commerce and finance than in the world of politics, where the integration of functions—the integration of the functions of nation-states in particular—seems to have proceeded at a slower pace. It is hard to compare, on the one hand, the balancing of constructive and destructive forces that accompanied global integration and disintegration in the decades during and after the Industrial Revolution, and on the other, the balancing of these forces after the postcolonial era of globalisation. However, one conclusion seems easy to make: in both periods early integration processes lagged behind differentiation processes and were accompanied by many part-processes of disintegration. In their book on Human Societies, Lenski and Lenski wrote: ‘During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, it seemed … that industrial societies would prove to be the least egalitarian of all’ (1987: 313; also quoted in Wouters 1990c). This section is not a fully developed or complete view, but the study of phases after the Anti-Colonial

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Revolution does not seem to justify a similarly forceful conclusion, but instead a more ambivalent one: on the one hand, a rise in global wealth and global income, and on the other, increasing inequality: the postcolonial world is becoming increasingly less egalitarian, that is, with money—income and wealth—as the criterion. The World Inequality Report 2018 (http://wir2018.wid.world/) provides ‘the first estimates of how the growth in global income since 1980 has been distributed across the totality of the world population’ and its reports are an extensive demonstration of this ambivalence, for example: ‘The poorest half of the global population has seen its income grow significantly thanks to high growth in Asia. But the top 0.1% has captured as much growth as the bottom half of the world adult population since 1980’ (wir: 40). ‘Inequality in wealth and income has increased: the global top 1 per cent of earners has captured twice as much of that growth as the 50 per cent of poorest individuals. The bottom 50 per cent has nevertheless enjoyed important growth rates’ (wir: 11). Of the world’s population, 35 per cent—1.8 billion—lived in extreme poverty in 1990. Half were in East Asia and Pacific, where the extreme poverty rate was 60 per cent, making it the poorest region at that time. An estimated 766 million people, or 10.7 per cent of the world’s population, lived in extreme poverty in 2013, and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half the world’s extreme poor. (http://datatopics.worldbank.org/sdgatlas/SDG01-no-poverty.html) The overall trends of competition and interweaving, and of differentiation and integration of social functions, have not changed direction, nor has a change occurred in the rise of growth rates of income and wealth among the world’s population. After reminding us that ‘it was not until the 1980s that state controls of capital movements were withdrawn’ and how this resulted in ‘a revitalisation of British and US financial aristocracies with all the critical consequences of the current crisis’, sociologist Reinhard Blomert provides a preview of the future. He writes: ‘We may expect that the pendulum will swing to the other side, with politicians again able and competent to tame the financial aristocracy by regulating investment streams, and by reducing the mobility of capital and the opportunities for the creation of future bubbles’ (2012).

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In the recent past, however, income and wealth inequality has risen— there is rather less than more income equality between top and bottom. Therefore, with income and wealth as criteria, the question of whether functional democratisation will continue must remain inconclusive and ambivalent. Among other things, it depends on the pace and extent to which people and politicians develop more of a global identification, prompting impulses towards social integration to gain in pace and catch up with processes of specialisation or differentiation in all social activities. It also depends on whether, should more integration conflicts emerge, more people will come to trust politicians over business people and finance oligarchs. They might, because they have a little control over politicians, but their ability to control the moneycrats is far more limited. And even before these conflicts rise to the surface, sooner or later the necessity of coordinating the institutional, national and international multipolarity and reciprocal control among various groups of people will exert more and more pressure in the direction of further political integration. The future of informalisation also depends, at least in part, on whether further globalisation brings the more egalitarian relations of further functional democratisation, because decreasing authoritarian relationships are important for social and psychic informalisation to flourish. However, in the relatively rich parts of the world, processes of informalisation are likely to continue their development in any case. We should expect integration conflicts and disintegration processes, but if humanity does not destroy itself, or if it is not destroyed entirely or in part by non-human intra- or extra-terrestrial catastrophes, we can expect the processes of globalisation, civilisation, functional democratisation, and informalisation to develop further in the same direction.

6 Universally Applicable Criteria for Analysing Social and Psychic Processes: Nine Tension Balances, One Triad

6.1 Introduction Until recently, discussion of the criteria relevant to studying civilising processes focused on self-controls mainly or, from a somewhat wider scope, on the balance of controls, that is, the balance between external social controls and internal ones, self-controls. Accordingly, the theory of civilising processes has been described as ‘the theory of increasing self-­control’, as if ‘increasing self-control’ was its main criterion.1 The theory of civilising processes is not restricted to increasing self-controls, and Elias never uses just ‘increase’ or ‘decrease’ of self-controls as a criterion, but always uses subtler, more differentiated formulations, as for example: ‘Individuals are compelled to regulate their conduct in an An earlier version appeared in Human Figurations 3/1 (2014).  In ‘Discussing civilisation and informalisation: criteriology’, with Stephen Mennell as co-author (2013), I describe a succession of similar misconceptions since the 1960s. 1

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increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner’ (Elias 2012a: 406).2 Now, in this chapter, it is time to round up my contributions to this book by presenting an outline of a sociology of balances. Most balances have been introduced in previous chapters, but not the super-balance, a triad, the triad of controls, which is presented by Elias in his What Is Sociology? as a major ‘criteria of social development’ (2012b: 151–152). The triad refers to ‘three fundamental controls of people in society—the control of humans over extra-human natural events, the control of people over each other, and the control of each person over him or herself ’ (Elias 2006b: 238). This triad has not received the acclaim it deserves and is brought to life only in the work of Johan Goudsblom,3 who has used it to structure his research, such as on the domestication of fire and on the expanding anthroposphere. Goudsblom thus shows how every period in human history is ‘equally relevant to us’.4

 In a kind of shorthand: Elias refers to external social controls towards selfcontrols, towards more all-round and more automatic self-restraints. ‘More allround’ standards of self-restraint apply more uniformly to all situations and relations. The trend in this direction implies that social demands for extreme self-control in specific situations become increasingly less compatible with an equally extreme readiness to act in accordance with one’s impulses in other situations. ‘More even’ refers to this diminution of extremes as codes of manners come to demand less volatile and more even-tempered or steady manners of steering in all types of relations, allowing for ‘more differentiated’ conduct and ‘increasing varieties’ and nuances in emotion regulation. ‘More automatic’ refers to the spread of a second-nature type of habitual self-restraints. 3  Among the balances presented as criteria in an earlier version, the ‘triad of controls’ was not mentioned. Johan Goudsblom made me aware of this omission. Many thanks, Joop! 4  At the end of his contribution to a 1929 discussion on why ‘the primitive is nowadays increasingly arousing our interest’, Elias said: ‘Today we have gradually reached the insight that the human becomes understandable only when it is comprehended in its entirety. That does not precisely mean from its beginnings, for there are no absolute beginnings; but one realises that it is necessary, in order to understand oneself, to go back as far as at all possible […] If one wishes to understand man, if one wishes to understand oneself—every period in human history is equally relevant to us’ (Elias 2006a: 74–75). 2

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In this chapter, the concept of a triad of controls is differentiated by distinguishing nine different yet interconnected tension balances, including those directly derived from the triad—the balances of control, particularly the balance of external social controls and internal ones or self-controls. The nine tension balances are presented as universally applicable guidelines for analysing social and psychic processes. Together, the triad of controls and the nine balances can serve as criteria that provide a research manual and summarise the theory of civilising processes as a ‘workable synthesis’.5

6.2 The Triad of Basic Controls 1. Elias introduced the concept ‘balance of controls’ to refer to the balance of external and internal social controls or self-controls. With his concept ‘triad of controls’, however, Elias widened the scope considerably, by including changes in the control of humans over ‘natural’ processes. About this first side of the triad, he writes: ‘the taming of fire, wild animals and plants for human use, like many other conquests of this kind, were steps in exactly the same direction as the exploitation of mineral oil or atomic energy for human purposes’. They were all ‘part of a slow and very gradual change in the relationship of human beings to non-­ human nature’ in which human and animal muscle power were displaced by other sources of energy such as coal, gas, electricity. In turn, and this is the second side of the triad, this change towards a more extensive control over non-human ‘natural’ forces depended upon a specialisation and coordination of human activities as well as a differentiation and integra The term ‘workable synthesis’ was first used by Goudsblom for describing how Elias succeeds in overcoming the one-sidedness and the exclusiveness inherent in the different perspectives of social science founding fathers such as Comte, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and Simmel, by integrating them into a workable synthesis (1977b: 79). Richard Kilminster also argues that Elias ‘managed to integrate through empirical research many seemingly incompatible perspectives into … a single testable model of human interdependence’, and he elaborates and expands on this ‘workable synthesis’ (2007: 14; italics in original). 5

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tion of their organisations, bringing about changes in the social control of people over each other. At the same time, and this is the third side of the triad, the expanding and increasingly dense and stable social ­organisations could only be maintained with the aid of a fairly stable control of short-term affects and instincts, exerted partly by social institutions and partly by the individuals themselves. For however dependent they may always be on others, they have learned from infancy to control themselves to a greater or lesser degree (Elias 2010b: 125–126). Elias argues at length that changes in the control of ‘nature’, in social controls, and in self-controls are highly interconnected—they are ‘interdependent both in their development and in their functioning at any given stage of development’ (2012b: 151), and therefore, the concept of the triad of controls offers a wide scope for studying connections between technological developments, developments in social organisation, and in self-controls (2012b: 152). Together, Elias notes: [c]ontrol of nature, social control and self-control form a kind of chain ring; they form a triangle of interconnected functions that can serve as a basic pattern for the observation of human affairs. One side cannot develop without the others; the extent and form of one depend on those of the others; and if one of them collapses, sooner or later the others follow. (2010b: 126) In the reception of his theory, however, both this perspective and these connections were largely obscured, overlooked, or misunderstood, perhaps also because the concept is absent from Elias’s major work of 1939 and its later presentation is scattered and rather general and abstract. He seems to content himself with merely emphasising its importance. A possible explanation of this absence of elaboration is in the theoretical problem of how to interpret the 1960s’ overall trend of increasingly lenient and loose social codes. Elias had no palatable interpretation until I sent him my translation from the Dutch ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’ (1976). As discussed in Chapter 1, it introduced the concept of ‘informalisation’ and its thesis that this trend did not imply declining social and personal demands on self-control; to the contrary, these were rising (Wouters 1976, 2007: 230–235; this book, Chapter 1).

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A fuller discussion of the (hopefully) complete variety of references by Elias to the triad can be found in my paper in Human Figurations 3/1 (2014b). Here, I have kept only one reference, to his essay ‘The fisherman in the maelstrom’, written in 1980–1982, when Elias used the triad of basic controls in describing ‘double-bind processes—a higher danger level perpetuating a higher affect- and fantasy-level of knowledge and beliefs, and a low level of danger control, thus maintaining exposure to dangers at a high level’. He explains why double-bind processes must have been ‘particularly inescapable’ in the life of our early ancestors: ‘they were short of knowledge and short of the triad of basic controls—control over natural processes, over social processes and, individually, over the processes of their own selves. Even at later stages double-bind processes can be observed at all three levels’ (2007: 131). 2. In his book on the post-philosophical sociology of Norbert Elias, Richard Kilminster states that ‘control over the self, society and nature as the three crucial conditions of all societies’ was an idea common to both Mannheim and Elias. Although, like other conceptual and theoretical similarities between them, their formulations in this case are not identical, but ‘embody the same idea expressed differently’. Kilminster links the striking similarities between them in the field of the sociology of knowledge, in particular, to the possible influence of each on the other during the period when their friendship was at its height, approximately 1925–1933 (2007: 44–45). From what Elias has written in scattered places, the idea of the triad was clearly present from the 1940s and 1950s onwards in manuscripts, although the public could only be aware of this much later. This can be explained from the work of Michael Schröter as Elias’s translator and assistant in 1976, and from 1982 until Elias’s death in 1990 his editor for sorting out manuscripts, his sorting-editor. On the basis of his intimate knowledge of Elias as an author and as a person, Schröter, in Erfahrungen mit Norbert Elias, provides an interesting answer to the question why Elias left so many manuscripts unpublished. It is centred on the observation that Elias ‘could hardly muster the detachment needed for making his own work ready for printing. Whenever confronted with a text of his own, he gave in to his imperative wish to write’ (1997: 226–228). Schröter characterises Elias’s writing as ‘a process

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of uninterrupted, never-ending condensation and enrichment’ (1997: 289; also: 235–236, 288–289, 292–295). In view of his writing process, Elias probably did not see a clear difference between what was published and what was not. For decades, his concentration was on the point of writing, and thus he expanded his theory without fully taking into account which parts he had already published, and which parts were only written in manuscripts. The idea and the concept of the triad of controls had been used at least since the 1940s and 1950s, had become deeply integrated into his theoretical thinking, and had structured his research. It was not, however, integrated explicitly enough in his writing, and thus the triad of basic controls was not noticed, or scarcely noticed, in the reception of his work—with one important exception. 3. The exception is in the work of Johan Goudsblom, who used and elaborated both the idea and the concept in Sociology in the Balance (1977a: 137–143), and in his work on the domestication of fire as a civilising process in the history of humankind, from the ‘original’ control of wildfires into camp fires up to its present-day control in electricity grids and in batteries as portable ‘electrifications’ of fire. In the introduction to Fire and Civilization (1992), Goudsblom notes that his study is focused mainly on the level of human history at large, and for this general perspective, Elias’s idea of the triad of controls functioned as a useful guideline. He writes: The important point is to see [these interlocking types of control] as interrelated and, together, as subject to change. Equally important is the observation that the triad of controls constitutes, at the same time, a triad of dependencies. […] As the human capacity to control fire has increased, so has people’s inclination to depend upon social arrangements guaranteeing its regular availability and minimizing the hazards it involves. (1992: 10) And on the level of individuals, the control of fire not only demanded that each individual acquire the skills needed to deal with fire, but, more generally, that each comply with the standards of conduct that had developed within these social arrangements.

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In his work on ‘the expanding anthroposphere’ (2002a), Goudsblom again structured his research on the ‘triad of controls’ over extra-human, inter-human, and intra-human processes; these are also indicated as technology, organisation, and civilisation. In this work, too, Goudsblom emphasises that each of the three forms of control can only exist and evolve in connection with the other two: Technology could not have developed without ‘social organisation’: the various means by which people are able to exchange information, co-­ordinate their activities and take into consideration the intentions and interests of others. Less obvious perhaps, but equally important, is the part played by ‘civilisation’: the social process in the course of which individuals learn to handle their own drives and emotions. […] Both technology and social organisation require civilisation; neither can function without it. (2002a: 27–28) Goudsblom shows how the control over fire was a basic condition for the subsequent emergence and globalisation of agriculture and industry, and thus for an expanding anthroposphere within the biosphere. His focus on the triad of controls helps considerably in bringing the entire expanding anthroposphere into view, which is a view of civilising processes at the level of human history at large. On this level, it becomes apparent how, in the course of the same process in which human dependence on the forces of nature has become less direct, dependence on cultural and social resources has increased. For ‘technology cannot exist in a social and cultural void: it can only function in a context of social organisation and civilisation’ (2002b: 374, c: 403). 4. In my own research, I have used the concept ‘triad of controls’ only in an article on technology (2006: 182). Understanding technology as being interdependent with social organisation and ‘civilisation’ goes against the rather dominant view of technical innovations as main causes of social change: the invention of a steam engine as causing the Industrial Revolution and the invention of ‘the pill’ as causing the Sexual Revolution. Present-day interdependence of technological innovation, social organisation, and ‘civilisation’ can be demonstrated, for example,

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from individuals who do not allow themselves (or their women) to use convenient means of birth control, and from the many groups and countries in which these means are not (yet?) made available, or scarcely so. Moreover, research from a somewhat longer-term perspective shows that the most significant change in sexuality had occurred already in the generations that lived before the 1960s. This research was reported in Chapter 3, Sect. 3.5. In the major part of my research, however, I have concentrated on interconnections between technologies on the one hand and external and internal social controls on the other via the window of changes in the latter. Connections between the three sides of the triad of controls can be studied by focusing on the three inherent balances of control: between each one and the other two. Therefore, three of them can be derived directly from the triad. As the triad of controls clearly represents a higher level of synthesis than that of the balances, research structured along the lines of these balances is expected to yield results that are preparatory in terms of the task of integrating them on that higher level of synthesis.

6.3 Nine Tension Balances In doing process sociology, the attempt to steer away from dualisms soon brings balances, ratios, blends, or alloys into view. Unlike the balances we know as seesaws and kitchen weighing scales, they are multipolar tension balances, multileveled and susceptible to change in more than one direction and from one level to other levels. The list of tension balances could be easily supplemented, although in most cases these supplements can be included in one of the nine that are mentioned in this chapter. The phase of informalising processes becoming dominant in the late nineteenth century provides an example: the spread of informal manners simultaneously demanded the development of a more conscious or ego-dominated type of self-regulation on the part of more and more people. With these new demands, prevailing tensions in manners and in self-regulation came to arise predominantly from the

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balance between conscience and consciousness or, as Hans-Peter Waldhoff (1995) has put it, from the ‘superego–ego balance’. These and similar changes in manners and self-regulation can be ordered as changes in the balance of external and internal controls and also as indications of shifts in the balance of power and dependence. For as networks of interdependence expanded and the inherent cooperation and competition intensified, the pressures to develop a higher-level balance between directness and tactfulness have continued to rise, making emotion regulation more important as well as more highly appreciated. This example also shows how heavily interconnected these tension balances are: a change in one of them can be expected to go hand in hand with changes in the others. However, not all balances are equally relevant to all kinds of studies, if only because some balances are more widely applicable than others. Some tension balances such as the lust-balance are only applicable on the level of human beings—that is, on levels of social integration. Others, such as the balance of power and of the differentiation of functions and their integration on higher levels, resulting in a hierarchy or multiple hierarchies of integration levels, are applicable in biological evolutionary processes as well as in long-term social processes. The differentiation of social functions in long-term social processes is also followed by their integration on higher levels and also results in multiple hierarchies of integration levels, although integration processes have often lagged behind. The transition from constituent parts such as cells to a higher level of organisation in the evolutionary hierarchy of levels cannot be understood without realising that this is ‘a process in which relationships of power and dominance play a part’, writes Elias. ‘The nature of dominance on various levels differs,’ he adds, ‘but to gain a picture of the process of the great evolution we cannot entirely do without a concept of this kind, and related ones such as the power struggle and the balance of power’ (Elias 2007a: 220–221). The interconnectedness of these nine tension balances implies, as a rule of thumb, that as more of them are drawn into research, the more solid the evidence tends to become. In what follows, I shall first mention the nine tension balances, and subsequently, I will give an indication (or a reference) of how they have

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served as guides for doing process sociology. The following balances have structured my research: 1. the balance of competition and cooperation and of differentiation and integration 2. the balance of trends: dominant trends, receding trends, counter-­ trends, and sub-trends 3. the balance of external social controls and internal ones or self-controls 4. the balance of power and dependence 5. the balance of diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties, and of functional democratisation and informalisation 6. the balance of formalisation and informalisation 7. the lust-balance, of lust and intimacy, or sex and love 8. the we–I balance 9. the balance of involvement and detachment 1. The balance of competition and cooperation, closely related to what in the previous chapter has been called the competition and interweaving mechanism, functions as a motor of change in the balance and level of the differentiation and integration of functions. They have featured as major balances in Chapters 2 and 5. The balance of competition and cooperation can be determined at all levels of social integration; when competitive pressures towards decentralising or centrifugal tendencies were dominant, societal tensions were quite different from those when centripetal tendencies, pressures towards cooperation and integration were dominant. Therefore, at the level of one or more societies up to a global level, this balance opens a window on changes in the size and density of networks of interdependencies (figurations) and thus on their level of differentiation and integration. In recent ages, as cooperation between people and their organisations expanded and became more complex and multilevel, competition tended to become more pacified and subtle as well as more intense. The interweaving of people and their organisations gave rise to more cooperation in competitive relations and more rivalry in cooperative relations. In more

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developed countries with high levels of interdependency at which most people have learned to assess and negotiate their own and each other’s ability to live and operate as opponents and partners simultaneously (see Sect. 5.4 of this book), this tension balance has become increasingly connected to the balance of work and play: how much play there is in work and how much work in play. Changes in these balances provide indications of changes in the levels of functional and social differentiation and integration, while changes in regulating the inherent tensions and conflicts in these processes open a window on the level of pacification. In his On the Process of Civilisation, Elias focuses on the competitive struggle for land as the main driving force of a monopolisation of the use of physical violence and taxation in state-formation processes. For this process, he coined his concept ‘monopoly mechanism’. Indeed, the European Union and ‘human rights’ are examples of state-formation processes having proceeded to an international and global level. However, a world-state monopoly still seems far-fetched, and it would be more adequate, therefore, to speak of a ‘competition and interweaving mechanism’ (see Chapter 5, Sect. 5.6, and Wouters 1990c: 74–75), thus drawing more attention to the continuation of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The working of these forces and this mechanism can be examined by studying changes in the balance of competition and cooperation. Thus, this balance functions as a criterion for perceiving and understanding changes in the length and density of interdependency networks as well as in levels of differentiation, integration, and pacification (see also Wouters and Mennell 2013, 2015: 556–560). 2. ‘A simple search for other trends than the dominant one could help to end many pointless debates,’ said Joop Goudsblom when he suggested to include ‘the balance of dominant and recessive trends’. Indeed, this is a major motive to introduce the balance of trends: dominant and co-­ dominant trends, sub-trends, and counter-trends, as I prefer to call them instead. I do so, because in addition to dominant and recessive trends, there are others. Goudsblom himself presents the domestication of fire as a trend that ‘prepared the ground for the next two transformations … the transition to agriculture or “agrarianisation” … and the large-scale application of fossil energy or “industrialisation”’, and then draws attention to

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the fact that these various ‘sub-trends’ all ‘constitute processes which are still going on. The emergence of agriculture did not put an end to the domestication of fire, nor did the industrial revolution put an end to agriculture… They may become less dominant; but they do not come to a stop’ (1989: 19). Goudsblom also distinguishes between universal and dominant trends, adding that ‘it may not be a bad rule of thumb and not an unsound research strategy to assume that for any given trend a counter-­ trend may be found, operating in the opposite direction’ (1989: 22). Examples are civilising and de-civilising, integration and disintegration, but in the long run these counter-trends clearly have not been dominant. Many examples in Chapter 5 show how important it is to recognise that within long-term processes there are often contradictory part-processes, for example, de-civilising currents within civilising processes, and social disintegration occurring simultaneously with social integration. In the long run, however, ‘a cluster of five closely interrelated trends has been dominant in human history,’ writes Goudsblom: As a direct result of agriculture there was a trend towards higher production of food … leading to an increase in numbers of the human population and to an increasing concentration of people in ever more densely populated areas … there were processes of specialisation as to social functions and of organisation in increasingly large units such as states, markets and religious cults … [giving] rise to increasing differences in power, property and prestige, … a process of social stratification. In a way these five trends represent variations of the theme of differentiation and integration which Herbert Spencer (1874) indicated as the twin motive forces underlying evolution in general. The growth, concentration and increasing organisation of human populations may be seen as reflecting integration, specialisation as reflecting differentiation, and organisation as reflecting both. (1989: 23) The trends of functional democratisation and informalisation or, in other words, of decreasing contrasts and increasing varieties, present an example of a different type of balance; the relation between both sides of the balance is of a different order. Perhaps they can be characterised as co-­ dominant trends. The rise of ambivalence that is identified as a civilising

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force, as a motor driving towards diminishing extremes in conduct, is in fact the product of a rise in both trust and distrust resulting in higher levels of trust. In this process, acting upon feelings of distrust and suspicion is becoming increasingly counterproductive. 3. The third balance is derived most directly and obviously from the triad of basic controls; it is the balance of controls that focuses on changes in the relation between external social controls and internal ones or self-­ controls. As competition and cooperation within interdependency networks became more interwoven and power and dependency relations less unequal, external social controls directed at preventing people from becoming involved in forbidden situations and relations increasingly came to focus on internal ones, that is, on self-controls. This implied a continued anchoring of the requirement to be able to control impulses and emotions, including those considered ‘dangerous’ for evoking the fear of landing on a slippery slope towards losing social and personal value. In this process, control over this fear was strengthening and the level of mutually expected self-controls or mutual trust was rising. And as internal controls became more all-round, differentiated, subtle, even, and automatic or habitual, the level of mutual suspicion and fear tended to decline. The decline and disappearance of chaperones is a case in point, for it went hand in hand with the internalisation of their functions: women had to become their own chaperone and men also had to incorporate the chaperone by not bothering women without the presence of such a guardian. They had to distinguish subtly between approaching women more freely and boldly and yet without bothering them and affecting their sense of freedom. As these societal expectations settled, external social control came to be focused increasingly on internal ones. Thus, external controls directed at preventing people from becoming involved in forbidden situations and relations, thus blocking possibilities of yielding to temptation, became increasingly exercised on the self-regulation of people who are now expected to prevent these transgressions under their own steam. External social controls changed direction: they became directed at the vigour and flexibility of the inner limitations that people impose on themselves in order not to give in to the temptations of ‘dangerous’ situations and relations—dangerous, that is, if it meant an unwanted violation of the social code. They did not diminish. On the

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contrary: the social sanctioning of behaviour showing a flawed control of conscience gained ascendancy. 4. Closely connected to changes in the balances of control, competition, and cooperation are changes in the balances of power, in the power and dependency relations between regions, states, social classes, genders, and generations. This connection may explain why the twentieth century saw processes of decolonisation and continued decline of imperialism, and, in all Western industrialised countries, a continued emancipation of workers, women, homosexuals, old people, and children. The emancipation of women and youth implied that more men were taking the needs and desires of their wives more into account, and that more parents did the same with their daughters and sons. This power gain of young people and women went hand in hand with an emancipation of their sexuality and with a growing taboo on domestic violence. I have examined, for example, how changes in sexual codes and practices dovetail with changes in power ratios, and how the sexual careers of young girls and boys reflect declining inequalities between the sexes and the generations (Wouters 2004, 2012, 2013, and Chapter 3 in this book). Elias was always keen to emphasise that power and dependence are aspects of all social relations, that all relations are relations of power and interdependence, and embedded in networks or webs of interdependence. All balances of control implied in the triad of controls are largely balances of power and interdependence: the power of human beings over non-human nature, over each other and their society and over themselves, and their dependence upon these powers. To his (and John Scotson’s) book The Established and the Outsiders (2008), first published in 1965, Elias later added two essays in which he introduced and expanded the concept of established-outsider relations. This concept is part of his established-outsider theory, in which relations of power, status, and self-evaluation are placed in the centre of attention. In the book, originally presented as A Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems (its subtitle) in a place they called Winston Parva, Elias and Scotson explain differences in power, rank, we-images, and self-­evaluation between two communities that consisted of very similar groups—both working class. They answer questions such as why and how one of them succeeds in monopolising power resources and uses them to exclude and

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stigmatise members of the other group, and how that is reflected in the collective we-images of both groups and experienced in their self-­ evaluation. In an essay, written for the Dutch translation in 1976, Elias presents the ‘Winston Parva model’ (Elias and Scotson 2008: 1–36). As a model it depicts a particular balance of power and control. In a later essay, written for the German translation in 1990, Elias integrated the term model in the title: the Maycomb model (Elias and Scotson 2008: 207–231). This shows that he had again taken up his old plan of presenting a series of established-outsider models, thus developing a general theory of power relations between human groups and showing e­ mpirically how the experience and the whole psychic make-up of the people involved are moulded by them. The presentation of both models, the Winston Parva model in particular, is based on constant comparison, implicitly and explicitly, with other established-outsider figurations in different classes and in other eras. On a more general and abstract level, Elias had done exactly this in 1956, in his essay ‘Problems of involvement and detachment’, when discussing the construction of a theoretical synthesis in a ‘model of models’ (2007a, b: 92 and 184) and in 1970 by presenting his ‘game models’ in What Is Sociology? (2012b: 66–98).6 The original book also contains comparisons that connect the study of Winston Parva to the study On the Process of Civilisation, for example where the authors write that ‘already the second generation of an expanding though still secluded community near an industrial town could throw up its own local “aristocracy”’ (p. 100), functioning in many respects like a ‘good Society’, including the use of gossip as an instrument of power. In addition to this implicit comparison with On the Process of Civilisation, here is a more explicit one: Circles of old families in relation to those over whom they successfully claim status superiority are as a rule more ‘civilised’ in the factual [meaning: technical] sense of the word: their code demands a higher level of self-­restraint in some or in all respects; it prescribes a

 I thank Willem Kranendonk for pointing to the game models in this connection. 6

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more firmly regulated behaviour either all round or in specific situations, which is bound up with greater foresight, greater self-restraint, greater refinement of manners and which is studded with more elaborate taboos. (Elias 2008b: 178; cf. ‘Note on the text’: xii–xiii) In this quotation, Elias refers to his On the Process of Civilisation in a note, thus showing that the title of this book indeed draws attention to differences and changes in the level of self-restraints. However, this quotation also shows a vibrant though implicit established-outsider theory—the ‘circles of old families’ as ‘the established’ and ‘those over whom they successfully claim status superiority’ as ‘the outsiders’—and a focus that clearly is directed at the connection between established-outsider relations and civilising processes, or, in more general terms, between social and psychic processes, and in terms of this chapter, between the balance of power and the balance of controls. Both theories and balances clearly complement each other; they are sides of the same coin, parts of the same theory, and (building) material of the triad of basic controls. 5. The balance of diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties, and of functional democratisation and informalisation, has been dealt with extensively in Chapter 5 of this book. Section 5.1 is entitled: Functional democratisation or ‘diminishing contrasts’ and informalisation or ‘increasing varieties’ as side effects of differentiation and integration processes. Chapter 5 shows how the two balances are interconnected, with each other and with the other balances. 6. Criterion six consists of changes in the balance of formalisation and informalisation of which this book is an extensive demonstration, but I will present a short summary. As discussed in Chapter 1, up to the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a long-term process of formalising manners and disciplining of people. More and more aspects of behaviour were subjected to increasingly strict and detailed regulations that were partly formalised as laws and partly as manners. From the late nineteenth century onwards, in the West, informalisation became the dominant trend. The gradual trend towards more pre-marital sex throughout the twentieth century was part of the more general process of informalisation, just like the nineteenth-century trend towards controlling the place of sex in

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marriage was part of a more general process of formalisation. In the nineteenth century, increased control of sexual impulses and emotions, part of an overall tightening of self-restraints, was accomplished to a large extent by emphasising its social, psychic, and hygienic necessity. Imprinting more rigid and detailed restraints was accomplished, for example, by highlighting the serious dangers of masturbation for morality and health. This fear-mongering and its social context pressured towards more rigid and detailed codes of behaviour and feeling. It will have stimulated the rise of rigid second-nature counter-impulses on ‘first-­ nature’ sexual impulses. Informalisation has been a trend towards widening the range of socially accepted behavioural and emotional alternatives, a change from fixed rules to flexible guidelines, depending on the various types of situation and relation. This widening range of socially accepted options went hand in hand with increasingly careful scrutiny of the choices made, triggering not only greater flexibility and reflexivity but also an ‘emancipation of emotions’, which included an emancipation of sexuality, a sexualisation process. Especially since the 1960s, almost the entire spectrum of behavioural and emotional codes has seen a controlled liberalisation, a regulated deregulation. It went further in the Netherlands than in most other Western countries (see Wouters 2007, 2013). Continued expansion and intensification of social competition and cooperation implies incitement to ongoing social and psychic emancipation and integration. For looser manners and the whole process of informalisation appear to be associated with a collective emancipation of lower classes in society and with a mental or ‘psychic informalisation’: the emancipation of ‘lower’ impulses and emotions in personality. As lower classes were represented in the power centres of society and lower affects in the power centre of the personality—consciousness—there was a corresponding change in the codes for regulating manners and emotions. As the social and psychic boundaries became more porous, social groups and psychic functions became more integrated, which means that communication and connections between both social groups and psychic functions become more fluid and flexible. Psychic informalisation or ‘emancipation of emotions’ refers to the growth of psychic openness: when emotions and impulses under the reign of a fairly rigid second

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nature emancipate and are admitted to the regulating centre of personality—consciousness, they become directly involved in conscious decision processes. That ‘first nature’ impulses become less automatically suppressed by second-nature counter-impulses and become more subjected to conscious self-regulation means that connections between ‘first nature’, second nature, and consciousness lose some of their hierarchical order and imperviousness. They become more open and smoother. I have introduced the concepts of ‘third nature’ and ‘third-nature personality’ to draw attention to these changes and to clarify them. The term ‘second nature’ refers to a self-regulating conscience that functions to a great extent automatically. The term ‘third nature’ is indicative of a development from this ‘second-nature’ self-regulation in the direction of a more reflexive and flexible one. It draws attention to the development of a presence of mind or a level of consciousness on which ideally it becomes ‘natural’ to attune oneself to the pulls and pushes of both ‘first’ and second nature, as well as the dangers and chances, short-term and long-­ term, of any particular situation or relation (Wouters 2007). The long-term process of informalisation could only become dominant after processes of interweaving, of social and psychic differentiation and integration, had reached a critical level. Only from a critical moment in these processes onwards can regimes of manners and emotions allow for informalisation to become dominant. The same happens in the life course of individuals: life necessarily begins with a period in which formalisation is dominant, for children can only learn to play with the rules and practise a ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ after reaching a critical phase of learning how to regulate themselves. Today, they usually are about 11 or 12 years old before their conscience is sufficiently developed to respond in more conscious, flexible, and varied ways to its directives. Lo and behold: the breakthrough of a psychic process of informalisation. As national, continental, and global integration processes exert pressure towards increasingly differentiated regimes of manners, they also exert pressure towards increasingly reflexive and flexible regimes of self-­ regulation. The term ‘third nature’ refers to a level of consciousness and calculation in which all types of constraints and possibilities are taken

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into account. It is a rise to a new level on ‘the spiral staircase of consciousness’ (Elias 2010b: 95). 7. A seventh criterion concerns changes in the lust-balance, changes in the balance of lust and intimacy, of sex and love, in the social codes regulating sexuality, lust, intimacy, and love in the relations between girls and boys, women and men, parents and children. At about the same age as their breakthrough of learning to play with rules, children become sexually mature. In comparison to relatively new physical and/or sexual experiences and desires, their relational ideals and practices are already well-developed, as is their whole pattern of self-regulation. Thus, becoming sexually mature and the development of sexual impulses and longings find a bed—so to speak—in relational developments. How young girls and boys integrate sexuality into their personality and figuration ideals can be recapitulated as the development of their lust-balance, the balance between the longing for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring intimacy. It amounts to their ways of finding an answer to the lust-­balance question: when or within what kinds of relationship(s) are what kinds of eroticism and sexuality allowed and desired? The balance of these longings—in short, the balance between the longing for sex and for love—not only changes in puberty and in the further course of life, but also across generations. All people develop a type of lust-balance that is more or less characteristic of their generation and their sex, reflecting the directing influence of the codes, ideals, and practices that were dominant when they grew up. Their parents, grandparents, and previous generations had a different spectrum of answers to the lust-balance question, and these intergenerational changes open a window for studying collective lust-balance developments. This means that the ways in which the changes of becoming sexually mature are integrated as lust-balance longings into a previously developed pattern of longings and ideals which not only differ between individuals, but also between social classes, genders, generations, regions, cultures, and historical eras. Sexual careers also differ according to phases in lust-balance developments. For example, the Victorian attempt ‘to control the place of sex in marriage … by urging the desexualisation of love and the desensualisation of sex’ (Seidman 1991: 7) resulted in a lust-dominated sexuality for men and a complementary (romantic) love or relationship-dominated

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sexuality for women. Since the final decades of the nineteenth century, the traditional lust-balance of a lust-dominated sexuality for men and a complementary (romantic) love- or relationship-dominated sexuality for women has been shifting in the direction of a ‘sexualisation of love’ and an ‘eroticisation of sex’, provoking new and more varied answers to the lust-balance question (Wouters 2004). My most recent research shows how in the twentieth century, particularly since the 1960s, relations of intimacy and love have become more intense and demanding as inequality between the sexes and generations diminished. The emancipation of women went hand in hand with an emancipation of their sexuality. At the same time, parents—of different social classes to different degrees—have taken more of the interests and feelings of their children into account and also more of the sexuality of their teenagers. In the trend towards intimisation of the relations between women and men, as well as of the relations in which young people are raised and educated, the main vehicle of social control or monitoring has increasingly come to consist of the intimate relation itself. Thus, the emancipation of sexuality coincided with warmer loving relations, increasingly directed at the self-regulation and self-steering of young people, thus bolstering up a more general emancipation of both love and lust (Wouters 2012). 8. The criterion of changes in the we–I balance focuses on the balance between the emotive force of the we-identities of the people under study (the groups people refer to as ‘we’) and the emotive force of the I-identity of individuals (Elias 2010b). This criterion also directs attention to the tensions surrounding the emancipation of individuals from the groups they depend on and identify with. The changes usually conceptualised as individualisation imply one or more we-groups from (and in) which people individualise. The first individualisation is known as individuation. It involves the we-group of mother and father. Individuation refers to the beginning of an I-identity, when a young child experiences the budding realisation of being separate, not a symbiotic extension of the mother. The identification with parents and/or their representatives is a we-­ identification that develops as part of any developing we–I balance of individuals. The wider concept of individualisation draws attention to the larger context of we-groups such as families and survival groups that

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individuals belong to and depend on. The development of these we-­ identities includes the more or less automatic adoption of their definitions of ‘a good life’, and of what it takes to pass for ‘a man of the world’ or ‘a woman of the world’. Identification with established groups is in most cases almost automatic, particularly when their superior position is hardly or not contested. The opposition that has risen against the identification in the West with the West as a global upper class is at the root of most right-wing populist expressions in the West. Individuation and individualisation both refer to the development of I-identities amid we-identities. There is no I-identity without a we-­ identity. There is always a connection, and often also a tension, between the interests of a we-group and those of its single individuals—as well as a tension between the identification of individuals with their we-group(s) and their attempts at gaining greater independence by liberating themselves from the demands of these groups. From the end of the nineteenth century, when the I-identity of individuals was highly subordinated to their we-identity, there has been a zigzag spiral movement in the direction of emphasising personal identity over group identity. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the sense of liberation from the shackles of authoritarian relations was dominant. Expanding group-feeling or widening we-identification to the level of nations somewhat weakened the identification with we-groups such as classes, ethnicities, sex and gender, age, and religion—in the process of social interweaving, the boundaries between the latter faded somewhat as they became the constituting parts of a larger whole. At the same time, this change of the we–I balance in the direction of a national ‘we’ ran in tandem with a growing basis for individualisation—a change in the we–I balance of individuals in the direction of the ‘I’. Someone’s personal identity was increasingly sought in the individual person, in his or her history, character, body, sexual preference, and behaviour. As individuals became less strongly and less directly subordinated to their we-groups, their I-identities could take on a stronger emotive charge. Apparently, the process of social interweaving triggered a widening we-identification and nation formation, as well as providing a basis for individualisation and a rising societal level of mutual trust and, correspondingly, a declining level of anxiety, mutual suspicion, and hatred.

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In Chapter 4, I focussed on the quest for a larger community and a wider we-identity for people who are mourning, as we all are, to various degrees. I observed and discussed signs of the expansion of we-feelings beyond the nation-state. They are rising from the social interweaving that has spread to a global level. On the other hand, however, these very globalisation processes also seem to throw a spanner in the works of the West as they are increasingly perceived as a threat to the formation of weidentities beyond the national level. At that level, the globally rising disapproval of a western identification with the West as a global upper class is still growing and its implicit and explicit attack on Western superiority feelings functions for many as a driving force for seeking refuge inside their own nation, not beyond it. This spanner is known by names like ‘populism’, ‘America first’, ‘Brexit’. Thus, the wider we-identification they seek on the one hand is blocked on the other by the superiority feelings that, often unknowingly, are inherent in the we-identification with the West as a global upper class. 9. Number nine of the criteria for doing process sociology involves changes in the balance of involvement and detachment. Increasing levels of detachment from affective involvement of fearful and wishful fantasies go hand in hand with increasing levels of knowledge and control, not only of (non-human) natural processes but also of social and psychic processes. They involve the triad of controls. Norbert Elias used to restrict himself to this aspect of the balance of involvement and detachment, to its meaning in terms of the sociology of knowledge. In addition, this balance can also be used fruitfully as a criterion referring to the strength and affective warmth of relationships on the one hand and on the other hand to the social distance and the psychic detachment maintained. This perspective draws attention to the question of how expressions of affective immediacy and involvement compare to those of thoughtfulness, empathy, consideration, and reflexivity. Between parents and children, for example, informalisation went hand in hand with a trend in the direction of relations with greater intimacy and warmth (involvement), combined with greater caution and sensitivity (detachment). It was a shift from an emphasis on obedience to institutional and adult authority, sanctioned by corporal and other punishments, to an emphasis on qualities linked to the self-regulation of

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children, sanctioned by reasoning and differentiations in warmth and permissiveness (see Alwin 1988). In their relations, affective warmth as well as reflexive thoughtfulness increased, and this change occurred in most social and psychic relations: they changed towards decreasing social and psychic distance and increasing openness in combination with rising affective and reflexive thoughtfulness. Whether focusing on human relations or on knowledge, in the long run, changes in the balance of involvement and detachment went in the direction of reaching higher levels.

6.4 Conclusion The triad of basic controls and the nine balances are taken from, or fit into, Elias’s theory of civilising processes and they are universally applicable—which means they can be used in all social science. They can all be seen and presented as differentiations, shades, or nuances of the triad, putting flesh on a higher level of synthesis and integration. Together, the triad and these balances (and their manifestations as outlined in the examples presented) offer a search manual of a figurational process theory that permits the bombarding of source materials with questions derived from them. Each balance refers to a part-process that is interconnected with the others. Changes in the balance of controls, for example, cannot be studied separately from changes in the balance of power and dependence, for any exercise of social control is at the same time an exercise in power revealing positions in a web of interdependencies. It is my experience that a shower of questions implicit in these balances is likely to illuminate different yet partly overlapping differentiations of the same social and psychic processes and figurations. And from attempts at integrating these differentiations, the contours of the various levels of a particular triad of controls may emerge.

Part Two Civilisation and Informalisation: The Selection. Six Chapters by Six Authors

7 Informalisation Through the Lens: Black & White and the Development of Photography as Art Jonathan Fletcher

7.1 Summary This chapter traces the development of photography as art in Europe and the United States from the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on the prominent role of black & white in fine art photography. I outline four phases in the development of photography as art, including a period of informalisation at the end of the nineteenth century, which briefly gave way to a formalisation phase during the beginning and middle of the twentieth century when photography gained a degree of autonomy and emancipation from painting and sculpture. From the 1960s a broader wave of informalisation saw the integration of photography into the art establishment that drew colour image-making into fine art photography. Ironically, the rising fortunes of colour served to crystallise the role of monochrome. Today, it endures as one of the several options available in the toolbox of photographic artists, and for many of them, it is a creatively definitive choice that serves to enhance their quest for authenticity in artistic expression.

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_7

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7.2 T  he Contemporary Appeal of Black & White1 The impetus to write this chapter comes from my own experiences as a photographer specialising in black & white, shooting with mainly medium- and large-format analogue cameras. Initially I tended to gravitate towards black & white because I have a congenital colour vision deficiency called deuteranopia, more commonly known as redgreen colour blindness. As a result, for me, post-­processing colour images usually entails a degree of guesswork and insecurity, while black & white offers less risk and greater reliability in predicting the look and feel of the finished work. And for technical reasons to do with temperature control and the type of chemicals involved, it is faster, cheaper and easier to process black & white film yourself, avoiding the need to send it off to a lab and incurring the inevitable delay that adds to the already protracted analogue workflow in today’s world of instant digital photography. But the more I produced images in monochrome,2 the more intrigued I became with the artistic possibilities of the medium, and its development and current status as, if not the dominant influence, then certainly a significant and defining feature of contemporary fine art photography. Today, if you type ‘fine art photography’ into your search engine of choice, you will be presented with many accomplished photographic

 I am very grateful to Cas Wouters for his friendship over many years, his enthusiasm in  encouraging me to  write about photography and  for  his comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I would also like to thank Helmut Kuzmics, Sander Martens and Stephen Mennell for their comments and suggestions. 2  Technically, monochrome refers to images comprising gradations in tone of a single colour, not just those on the continuum of white through various shades of grey to black. Thus, Sepia refers to paintings or photographs that are made up of gradations of the grey-brown pigment derived from various species of cuttlefish. But the company behind the launch of the Leica M Monochrom was clearly marketing a camera with a non-colour, black & white sensor. For the purposes of this essay I use the terms black & white and monochrome interchangeably to refer to images produced with greyscale tones. 1

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images. Some of them will be in colour, but the vast majority will be in black & white. This contradicts the mass appeal of colour images that are produced and disseminated through screens and offline publications of the twenty-first century. As a reflection of lived experience, colour images predominate: people see the world in colour and they choose to capture and share their images to reflect this experience as accurately as they can. As a partial representation of ‘reality’, it is puzzling why anyone would create images in black & white at all. Why do photographers who specialise in creating art images choose to do so in monochrome? Several reasons are put forward by photographers themselves. Michael Freeman (2017) suggests it helps to transcend or abstract from reality, reduce images to their essential elements, enable greater expressive range and somehow connect with the past. Indeed, it is not very surprising to find a certain degree of romantic attraction in the use of black & white. But much of the attraction is couched in technical terms, referencing black & white’s filmic quality that is difficult or impossible to achieve through digital means. Above all, justifications for shooting in monochrome invariably settle on the ability of black & white to focus on line, form, structure, contrast, tone and texture (Kimmerle 2016), which open up a range of artistic expression that is somehow more ‘pure’ without the ‘interference’ of colour.3

 Until about three million years ago, ancestral humans had limited, dichromatic red-green colour vision, and due to their primarily nocturnal living conditions, they could perceive ultraviolet light, an ability they lost when they evolved trichromatic vision, that is, the ability to distinguish red, green and blue light. In the retina of the human eye, dim light photoreceptors (rods) far outnumber the cells responsible for colour perception (cones): about 120 million versus 6 million, respectively (see Gerl and Morris 2008). In terms of evolutionary time, monochrome vision is probably older than colour, enabling ancestral humans to distinguish line, contrast and texture long before the ability to perceive colour emerged. Colour vision also seems to deteriorate as people get older and to disappear from memory when people lose their ability to see. See Parker (2003) for an evolutionary perspective on the emergence of vision during the Cambrian period. 3

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The master black & white photographer Elliot Erwitt famously remarked in an interview with his son for the New York Times, ‘Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive’ (Erwitt 2013), suggesting a mysterious power of greyscale to penetrate below the superficial layer of colour and access a more meaningful dimension that exists beyond mere description. In a similar vein, others point to the clarity of black & white that is free from the distraction of colour (Savage 2016: 162). Or to its more natural and authentic representation for portraits, enabling the photographer to focus on deeper elements of a subject’s personality, or to achieve greater distance from the erotic associations of nude photography, which are amplified with colour. An overriding theme of the ‘monochrome aesthetic’ of light, shade and grey is that it reveals the fundamental characteristics of the person, thing or place that is portrayed. But on a very simple, practical level, black & white images simply stand out in a crowded world of social media and colour saturation. And in the digital age, conversion of any image shot—nearly all of which are captured in colour by most digital camera sensors—can be transformed into monochrome with the touch of a screen, the push of a button or the click of a mouse. But why is black & white endowed with qualities of fundamental interpretation; access to underlying structure, line, contrast, tone and texture; and the power to deliver a greater range of artistic expression? Has it always been so highly valued? Why is it still held in such high esteem as a style of art photography? How did the current situation arise historically? These short questions have some long answers, and I can only hope to explore their contours and suggest avenues for further research. My intention is to draw connections between photographers who created specific types of images that they themselves classified as art, and broader social and psychical processes that shaped these men and women, and which they in turn moulded with their plans and intentions to create artistic images. Cas Wouters’s work on informalisation provides an ideal springboard with which to sketch a sociological approach to art that has the ambition to go beyond the more conventional understanding of creative styles and genres as ‘art movements’ that usually remain unexplained and are often presented as the inventions of brilliant individuals.

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To understand the role of black & white in fine art photography, it is important to have an overall perspective on the development of photography as art, as distinct from the documentary, street, portrait, news, fashion, commercial, sports or, indeed, snapshot photography. From the invention of the first fixed photographic image in the nineteenth century, it is possible to distinguish four phases in the establishment of photography as art. My short outline of these phases will show how art photography was shaped in competition with artists making painting and sculptures as represented in the art establishment in Europe and the United States. The art establishment includes exhibition specialists who own and manage galleries and museums, shop owners and auctioneers who sell works of art; teachers at universities and colleges; a broader public of admirers, buyers and patrons (often wealthy individuals and state-­ funded or commercial organisations); and editors, book authors and critics writing for newspapers and magazines, which today would encompass online channels and digital publications. During the course of this necessarily brief sketch, I will draw connections between the development of photography as a form of creative expression and social processes of informalisation and formalisation. In the final section I develop this further with a theoretical commentary on established-outsider relations, individualisation, aestheticisation and civilising processes, focusing on informalisation of the latter since the 1880s in Europe and the United States. I also suggest a provisional explanation for why monochrome became, and to a large extent continues to be, a key feature of photography defined as art.

7.3 F our Phases in the Development of Photography as Art a) Co-existence: Early 1840s–Mid-1880s The first durable and fixed photographic image was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but it was left to his associate, Louis Daguerre, to develop its potential as the daguerreotype, the first commercially available monochrome photographic format from 1839. At the time, photog-

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raphers used relatively large mechanical cameras and slow, light-sensitive materials that restricted capture of movement. Monochrome reproduction was the only option available to them. Apart from scientific registration, for example, of botanical subjects, surgery procedures or even asylum patients, the majority of photographers usually chose to capture landscapes and cityscapes that reproduced ‘painterly’ scenes, as well as portraits for the rising middle classes, often complementing and eventually replacing the miniaturist painters’ function as a recorder of familial likeness, and the status and wealth of groups and individuals who could afford to commission a photographer but not a painter. Daguerreotype photographers emerged as a professional group across the United States and throughout Europe, particularly in England, France and Germany. It was specialised work that did not attract much amateur interest for this reason. A competitive tension between painters and photographers characterises this phase as the latter increasingly encroach on the social function of the former. Painters and the entire art establishment were likely so impressed by the ‘realism’ of photography that painters were prompted to develop a less realistic style that was more interpretative and subjective, in order to distance their work from photographic realism. But while some painters embraced the ‘realism’ offered by photography, if only as a guide to assist in the execution of their own work on canvas, this did not translate into the acceptance of photography by the art establishment. In 1859 Charles Baudelaire clearly summarises the disdain for photography, which he saw as: [T]he refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies… By invading the territories of art, this industry has become art’s most mortal enemy. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its function, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether. (Baudelaire, quoted in Gernsheim 1962: 52–53) Technical innovations throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century enabled a degree of mobility in capturing images while travelling or exploring other countries and cultures. From 1851 the collodion process

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enabled a faster workflow with much higher image quality, but at the expense of cumbersome equipment that was prohibitively restrictive for all but the more committed and wealthier practitioners among the relatively formalised social circles of nineteenth-century Europe and the United States.4 Photographers developed specific skills, especially the need for foresight and pre-visualisation of images, but also the ability to draw on the traditional abilities of composition and form in painting. Indeed, they shared many similarities with paint-based image-makers. The entire procedure from capture to execution was expensive, so the demands on individual photographers to plan, think through procedures and consider the wishes of their customers, as well as their own creative ambition, were considerable. Less encumbered by concerns of mobility, portrait photographers were the first to specialise their technical and artistic skills in the service of commercial enterprise. The photographic profession opened access to portraiture, making it relatively affordable for larger numbers of the middle classes and certainly for those from higher social ranks to capture their likeness. Portrait image-making tapped into the growing individualism generated through industrialisation and burgeoning wealth of nation-­ state societies. Famous writers, artists, industrialists and politicians were recorded in monochrome prints that were sometimes ‘retouched’ or even coloured with paint and brush. But the legacy of famous individual portraits also suggests the social position and commercial means of photographers and the relative ease of access they had to their subjects. As a profession, photography was relatively exclusive, and it was decidedly not ‘art’. Despite the non-art status of photography, dedicated societies were formed across Europe during the 1850s, covering a broad spectrum of interests that catered mostly to the more technical and process aspects of image-making. But there was certainly evidence of artistic ambition in the work of many photographers at the time. John Edwin

 Indeed, many shared their social status with painters and sculptors of the time: most were from families that belonged to ‘good society’ or affiliated to a similar structurally elite organisation. 4

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Mayall’s daguerreotypes shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851  in London were one of the first recorded attempts to claim fine art status for photographic works. The Royal Society of Arts in London held the first exclusively photographic exhibition in 1853, and the same year saw the foundation of the Photographic Society of London, with Queen Victoria as one of its patrons. This signals a shift in the growing recognition of photography within the art establishment, at least in Europe, but in all likelihood across the Atlantic Ocean as well. In France, the Société Française de Photographie was founded in 1854, championing ‘straight photography’,5 an executional style that shunned composite printing and hand-work manipulation or retouching of the image either during or after development. It was the first signs of an approach to photography that would become more and more influential over subsequent decades and eventually achieve dominance in the twentieth century. This period also saw one of the first attempts to codify photography according to, in the words of the Photographic Society’s president, Sir William J. Newton, the ‘principles of Fine Art’ (in Gernsheim 1962: 74). Along with the art critics of his day, Newton’s defence of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century roughly marks the period as the beginnings of a break with tradition: key figures of the art establishment and photographers themselves began to loosen the grip of social sanctions that had been nurtured and cultivated for generations of higher status, higher ranking groups of people. Many of them enthusiastically embraced this new development, a disposition which is typical of informalisation. In doing so, they began to distance themselves both from the tradition of painting that depicted pastoral scenes and the lives of wealthy ‘good society’ people, and also from the view that painting and sculpture represent the exclusive domain of art. But the break was by no means complete or evenly distributed across social groups or countries in which the art estab Even the term ‘straight photography’ is suggestive of changing social and psychical relationships: ‘straight’ is in a similar league to words like ‘true’, ‘honest’, ‘pure’, ‘authentic’, ‘direct’, ‘essential’, ‘fundamental’ and ‘natural’, many of which are championed in some form or another by people who are wittingly or otherwise at the forefront of social processes of informalisation. 5

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lishment was most cohesive and influential. The next phase in the development of photography entailed a more direct and organised attempt to establish its artistic credentials and status.

b) Challenge: Mid-1880s–Early 1900s The final decades of the nineteenth century see a marked shift in the style of images produced by photographers. Once again, they take their cue from painters, which suggests these overlapping groups of image-makers shared similar social experiences, generating remarkable similarities in their approach. Often referred to as impressionistic photography, it is more widely known as Pictorialism. To some extent, the development of Picorialism photography may have arisen from the competition with impressionistic painting, which in turn may have emerged as a competitive reaction to the earlier ‘realism’ of photography. This probable scenario suggests that photography and painting developed in intense competition with each other. This seems all the more likely because both painters and photographers had been brought up in the same kind of families, all oriented towards the same ‘good society’ establishment, while as artists they both worked to the standards of good taste set by the art establishment (usually closely linked to a ‘good society’ establishment). And in terms of the images they produced, their approach was characterised by a more subjective, personal interpretation: Whereas Impressionism, the French art movement of the 1870s–1980s, aimed at capturing a momentary visual impression of a scene, impressionistic photography attempted to render a personal response to a subject. Soon the words “poetic”, “art”, “naturalistic”, and “impressionistic” all came to signal Pictoralist photography. (Warner Marien 2014 [2002]: 171) Characteristically, in their efforts to portray ‘impressions’, many Pictorialist photographers used long exposures, selective focus and/or a shallow depth of field that renders certain parts of an image (usually the main subject) in clear focus, and the rest (usually the background) in gradations of blur, often

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using pinhole cameras or soft-focus lenses. The approach involved an intentional distortion of the overall clarity and ‘realistic’ portrayal of landscapes and people that was a dominant form of imagery produced by photographers in the preceding phase and which is now perceived as somewhat stale, stilted and stiff. Inspired by the similar movement in painting, Picorialist photographers aimed to reproduce the visual style of that medium with their own. This represents what might be described as an ‘aesthetic turn’ in photography around the turn of the century. Similar to the ‘aesthetic turn’ that had taken place in painting before the realism of photography, it was a conscious attempt to establish the medium as worthy of consideration and display within the art establishment alongside paintings and sculpture. The renewed impetus and enthusiasm for artistic expression through photography led to the foundation of numerous societies and organisations across Europe and the United States. They provided a sense of cohesion, shared purpose and we-identity to a nascent and, in many respects, marginalised group of image-makers. They were outsiders on the periphery of the art establishment: For the most part they seem even more earnest than their contemporaries in painting and sculpture; for they were, in terms of the larger art world, an excluded sect, often relegated to the industrial sections of major exhibitions and forced to contend with jury selection by painters and sculptors. (Jeffrey 2010 [1981]: 97) In London the Linked Ring Brotherhood was founded in May 1892, subsequently becoming one of the more famous exponents and defenders of photography as art in the Pictorialist tradition. The Photo-Club in Paris followed in 1894, Das Kleblatt in Vienna, and others in Florence, Venice, Hamburg, Brussels and New York. The German Empress opened an international exhibition for artistic photography in the Reichstag building in 1896, with a similar exhibition held three years later in the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin (Gernsheim 1962: 139). Meanwhile, and still under the umbrella of Pictorialism, renewed efforts to cultivate the inherent qualities of photography in the production of art were taking shape: the capability of capturing and manipulating light through photographic means (with a camera, lens and light-sensitive

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material) that does not rely on additional ‘handcrafted’ manipulation with a paintbrush or the addition of images in the form of collage. In the United States, the Photo-Secession group broke from the New York Camera Club in 1902 with the declared intention of using photography as a means of artistic expression through straightforward technique—so-called straight photography—rather than borrowing or mimicking those derived from painting. They issued a statement of purpose to clarify their artistic ambitions: the object of the Photo-Secession is: To advance photography as applied to pictorial expression; To draw together those Americans practicing or otherwise interested in the art; and To hold from time to time, at varying places, exhibitions not necessarily limited to the productions of the Photo-Secession or to American work. (Warner Marien 2014: 179) Photo-Secession published a quarterly journal called Camera Work in 1903, which became the premier forum for photography as art in the Western world, featuring work from a wide variety of photographers in Europe and the United States. The Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City introduced many European painters to the US audience as well as provided an increasingly influential platform for the work of photographers featured in the exhibitions held there. Across the Atlantic, European photographers founded the International Society of Pictorial Photographers in 1904, dedicated to photography as an artistic mode of expression. Once again, the majority of them were relatively wealthy members of families that were part of a ‘good society’ network. Here we can discern an apparent tension in the Pictorialist photographers’ modus operandi: driven by artistic ambition, their images are still derivative of and clearly inspired by the more established artistic tradition of paint on canvas, but at the same time their focus on artistic self-­ expression contained the seed of a new approach to the photographic medium, one that drew ‘from within’, that is, from the inspiration of the individual photographer himself or herself. This new vision and practice for photography as art was a highly individualised and psychologised

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­ rocess of production that required photographers to exert conscious p pressure on themselves. Painting was no doubt still a major source of influence for large numbers of photographers at the time, but this new imperative encouraged photographers to avoid modelling themselves on paint-based art for their vision and style of execution. The significance and importance of this photography-specific ability extended beyond the Pictorialist approach to image-making, which for, it was even viewed with palpable disdain: If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph. (Paul Strand 1923, quoted in Gernsheim 1962: 154) By the early 1900s, photographers had established an inner-directed approach to image-making, a highly individualised way of working that stressed personal vision and the perfection of technique that is specifically ‘photographic’ and stands on its own, as a separate enterprise from the painting and sculpture held up as the we-ideal of the art establishment. But the emancipation from this paint and drawing mode of art was patchy and incomplete. The Pictorialist ‘movement’ had brought photographers together, generated a nascent we-identity as a group committed to an artistic ideal, and helped them define photography as a worthy member of the art establishment. In the process they opened the door to a further refinement and definition of its potential as a medium. This emphasis was carried forward by a new generation of photographers that helped shape the emergence of a new phase in the development of photography as art.

c) Emancipation: Early 1900s–Early 1960s The early twentieth century saw an intense period of experimentation in photographic image-making, again inspired by paint-based artists and the now widely known ‘movements’ of Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism and so forth. In their own way, each of them can be understood as expres-

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sions of a wave of informalisation and a break with tradition and the more formal precepts of the art establishment. But within photography, a new vision was starting to crystallise around what we can now recognise as a ‘modern’ approach to the medium. The resulting images were often abstract patterns of closeup objects or found materials arranged in rhythmic forms, photomontages combining illustration, painting and ­photographs, and so on. Man Ray, a trained paint-based artist, popularised the solarisation technique discovered in the previous century. He also produced Rayographs using objects placed on photographic paper without the use of a camera, inspiring Moholy-Nagy, also a former painter, to create his Photograms with three-dimensional objects. Moholy-Nagy taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar alongside avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In Russia during the mid-1920s, the former painter Alexander Rodchenko introduced his innovative series of photomontages: ‘Like the artist-photographers of 1900 they idealise and abstract. Unlike them they turn away from nature and deal with what is man-made, with readily available studio props and with the bits and pieces of a clockwork world’ (Jeffrey 2010: 116). This period of experimentation and overlapping activity of painters and photographic practitioners explored the boundaries and possibilities of the photographic medium, and in the process, it laid the foundations for establishing the relative autonomy of photography as art. As the dust settled, a new emphasis on realism emerged, driven particularly by German photographers in the 1920s, who amplified the apparent strength of the medium to reproduce the clear lines and sharp details of the world as they saw it. It was an attempt to remove the subjective influence of the photographer and showcase the objects depicted as realistically as possible. While this emphasis on realism was clearly apparent in the work of earlier photographers, it now began to achieve dominance as a way of defining photographic art. This marks a turning point away from photographic image-making that represented the world through a more emotionally involved and evocative visual style. It was a conscious rejection of Pictorialism, as summarised by one of its key practitioners: Let us, therefore, leave art to artists and let us try by means of photography to create photographs that can stand alone on account of

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their photographic quality—without borrowing from art. (RengerPatzsch 1927, in Gernsheim 1962: 171) This phase also marks a step away from the constraints of classical composition and perspective derived from painting. In 1929, influenced by the return to ‘realism’, or in any case the new emphasis on realism, August Sander’s images portrayed German society as objectively as he thought possible through a series of portraits depicting ‘types’ and characters from a wide variety of social classes. Objects, buildings, trees and landscapes were also captured with the camera as ‘objective’ realities, along with everyday situations and street scenes. Some photographers who felt compelled to work in this new realist direction were once self-declared Pictorialist image-makers. In the United States, Paul Strand was pre-­ eminent among those who embraced the renewed emphasis on realism, along with others such as Edward Weston and Edward Steichen, who had also moved on from his Pictorialist focus of a few years earlier. Weston, in particular, achieved global fame for his sharp, realistic images of everyday objects like peppers, pinecones and rocks, with a strong emphasis on surface texture, line and form. The new realist view was honed and perfected by Weston’s former student, Ansel Adams, whose work is now synonymous with this style of image-making. Together with several like-minded photographers, Adams formed the San Francisco-based Group f/64. Their name is derived from the smallest aperture setting on large-format camera lenses that, together with the appropriate focal plane movements of the cameras employed, results in an extended depth of field which renders both the foreground and distant objects in sharp focus. According to Group f/64, the practice of photography was meticulous and methodical. They championed pre-­ visualisation of the finished image in the field, before taking the shot. Postproduction was a detailed process. Together with Fred Archer, Adams invented the Zone System, which is still broadly popular and known to most students of photography. This prescriptive, methodical approach enables the practitioner to accurately establish the desired tonal range of black & white images from capture in the camera, through development, to production and manipulation through dodging and burning of the final print in the darkroom. Adams wrote three definitive works that

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dealt in detail with key areas of photographic competence. All three were published between 1948 and 1950, and each edition was subsequently reissued as late as 1995: The Camera, The Negative and The Print. Echoing the foundation of Photo-Secession some 30  years before, Group f/64 declared a fervent commitment to developing photography as art, a designation which they assumed it had by then already achieved, and at the same time forcefully distanced themselves from Pictorialist photography, which they saw as derivative of painting and graphic art: Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts. The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself. Not all photographers with artistic ambitions adopted this realist approach to photography. The influence of surrealism is an obvious ­counter trend but one that did not achieve the dominance of the approach adopted by Group f/64, which opened the door to new subjects for art photographers to capture, including the production of highly technical, or abstract images that depicted shapes, lines and textures in closeup, without further visual context. The Subjective Photography of the early 1950s took the individual photographer’s vision as the starting point for defining art photography, resulting in graphic images that celebrate form and dynamic relationships of their component parts. The new emphasis on realism in photography was not confined to whatever might be considered art within the now reconfigured art estab-

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lishment. It was taken to the streets and blossomed as a documentary tradition in the work of many talented practitioners, reflecting the similar interests of sociologists and visually extending their approach to the ‘object’ of their research (Becker 1974). Champion of ‘the decisive moment’, Henri Cartier-Bresson studied with the cubist painter André Lhote, absorbing his enthusiasm for classical rules of dynamic ­composition in painting. From the 1950s, Cartier-Bresson subsequently generated a formidable body of work that successfully links candid documentary and  the aesthetic qualities of photography as art, with compositions directly inspired by dynamic symmetry, revealing a finely tuned intuition for capturing geometric relationships in two dimensions. His images are an excellent example of an executional style that shares continuity with the precepts of an art establishment that placed a high value on the products of painters and sculptors. Soon that link was to be, if not entirely, broken, then significantly weakened and, in many respects, rendered defunctionalised, because it no longer served a meaningful purpose for justifying photography as a form of artistic expression.

d) Integration: Early 1960s–Present In many ways the work of Robert Frank was a watershed in the development of photography and its recognition within the art establishment. Particularly for commentators and gallery owners who are actively involved in the ongoing definition of what does or does not constitute art for their generation, there was simply nothing like The Americans before its publication in France in 1958 and the following year in the United States. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac, the book was an exposé of alienation and disenchantment, captured with gritty, sometimes slanting, unusually cropped and often candid black & white images. The photojournalistic style did not go down well with many contemporary critics, arguably because it broke with recently established conventions of the more formal, realist photography. It is easy to underestimate the extent to which it was considered at the time a peculiar and path-breaking aesthetic statement, marking a distinct shift both in what was considered to be photographic art within the art establishment (the book was funded

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by a Guggenheim Foundation grant) and in terms of dramatising a radically new, more informal mode of photographic expression. In short, it is probably one of the most prominent examples of the informalisation of black & white photographic art in the history of the medium. As such, it represents an informalisation process that once again swept through the richer societies of Western Europe and the United States in the 1960s; only this time informalisation became dominant and has remained so until the present time, despite short-term movements towards the formalisation of manners and behaviour that have emerged in the twenty-­ first century. Ironically, Frank’s most well-known work appeared around the same time that colour images became more widespread, particularly in advertising and magazine photography. Until the 1930s, black & white was the only option available to most photographers. Pictorialism and Straight Photography grew up in the absence of colour in the medium. But while colour processing was launched commercially in 1907 with the Autochrome plate, colour was not adopted on a broader scale until 1935 with the introduction of Kodachrome and its subsequent mass marketing. Only then was black & white relegated to just one option among the many available to photographers in the service of artistic expression. In other words, black & white became a creative choice, as formulated by Freeman: It began as necessity, then became accepted as normal, and now, with the full choice of colour (and any kind of colour) coupled with the infinite processing possibilities of digital images, it is a creative choice (Freeman 2017: 9). The availability and affordability of Polaroid pack film placed instant colour images into the hands of large numbers of amateur photographers. From the 1960s onwards, colour and black & white existed alongside each other before colour eventually became the dominant choice for the press, advertising and snapshots in the 1970s. But members of the art establishment resisted the encroachment of colour, despite key exhibitions, among them Stephen Shore’s exhibition of colour images of America in 1972 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and William Eggleston’s seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, which was selected and installed by John Szarkowski, then Director of the Department of Photography and author of William Eggleston’s Guide (1976). Eggleston’s work shocked critics with

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its dramatic, heavily saturated dye-transfer prints, a process that was at the time restricted mainly to commercial photography due to the high production costs involved. Walker Evans spoke for many photographers and critics at the time when he rejected colour’s ‘screeching hues’ and dismissively remarked, ‘colour photography is vulgar’ (quoted in Warner Marien 2014: 362). It was literally repugnant for many photographers who had grown up with and become emotionally and intellectually attached to monochrome. This conservatism was reflected because they had spent a lifetime, or part of it, mastering a medium that involved conceptualising in black & white. It was not that this was driven by fear of losing the game, but rather the idea that their black-and-white photography was more intellectual, crafted and dependent on a hard-­ won sensibility to how a raw scene from the world could be turned into a very different and specific art form (Freeman 2017: 32). The art establishment’s resistance to colour imagery stood in stark contrast to the acceptance of colour in almost every other context in which images were a significant medium, from journalism to commercial photography, documentary and the recording of everyday life with family and friends. From the 1950s, sales of colour televisions grew exponentially. In 1967 Apollo 11 astronauts recorded the moon and the earth from outer space. International colour coverage of a major war in Vietnam and minor national and international conflicts followed. Colour had rapidly achieved a level of conventional acceptance and a position of dominance in photography on a broad international scale. It was not long before the art establishment would follow suit. Black & white became a marginalised stylistic form of photographic expression. But what united Frank’s melancholic black & white and Eggleston’s bold and vivacious colour images was a shared emphasis, not only in the depiction of everyday experience but the literal and figurative reframing of it as an aesthetic experience in the form of photographic art. Eggleston is well aware of this dimension to his work and is quoted in the 1976 introduction to the MoMA exhibition declaring that colour is ‘existential and descriptive; these pictures are not photographs of colour, any more than they are photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience,

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as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera’ (Eggleston 1976: 1). This kind of experience is also part of the structures imposed by the social processes in which the photographer and camera are intertwined. This aestheticisation of everyday life marks a shift both in the photographers’ perception and in the sensibility of those who encountered their images as buyers, curators or gallery visitors. The work of both Frank and Eggleston embodies a highly individualistic approach to photography as art, based on a clear and distinct personal vision, with an emphasis on social documentation for Frank and, on the inherent form, structure and colour of the image for Eggleston. Photography was now more or less fully accepted by an art establishment whose members were also part of the same encompassing—and by this time broadly dominant—process of informalisation.

7.4 Informalisation, Black & White and Photography as Art a) Individualisation and Good Society In the ongoing, constantly shifting designation of what constitutes art, the art establishment performs a model-setting function for a wide range of people involved in the production, exhibition, buying and selling of images. The creative work of artists themselves fuels the entire dynamic network of shifting and uneven relations of power within and between these groups of people. But the composition of these networks and relative influence of the artists within them have significantly changed over the centuries. From around the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries, art patrons and buyers were largely representatives of ‘good society’, characterised by courts, aristocracies or absolute monarchical rulers, with specific expectations of conformity to artistic representations that supported their own contemporary group ideals and status (see Kempers 1994). Portrayals of people, animals and nature were often posed and stylised in accordance with the expectations of the public who

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experienced or purchased them. Over a 400-year period, ‘the sentiments to which artists appealed and whose arousal their public enjoyed were filtered through an expanding armour of self-control agencies such as reason and conscience’ (Elias 2009f: 216). In other words, this whole process can be understood as part of a civilising process in Elias’s technical sense of the term (2012a): the formation of a more or less automatically functioning and more demanding conscience that becomes ‘second nature’, a habit that is rarely the subject of conscious reflection (Wouters 2007: 30—see also Chapter 1 of this book). But through informalisation, this ‘second-nature’ personality is transformed in the direction of what Wouters calls ‘third nature’: In many respects, processes of conscience formation can be perceived as processes of psychic formalisation. From this perspective, psychic informalisation is a process in which the rulings of conscience become less rigid, less automatic, allowing for a more conscious, more flexible, and varied repertoire. This process involves a shift towards the more reflexive and fl ­ exible self-regulation of third-nature (see Wouters, Chapter 1 above). The long-standing tradition of artistic representation was challenged towards the end of the nineteenth century, beginning with impressionism and other art ‘movements’ of the twentieth century, such as expressionism, cubism, surrealism and modernism. Within this newly emerging context, artists had greater freedom than before to explore their own vision for their work and showcase its inherent qualities and relationships of composition, including line, colour, contrast and texture to provoke and stimulate a range of thoughts and emotions that were hitherto unacceptable or even repugnant and taboo. ‘The pendulum of the artists’ interest swung away from… objectifying tendencies in the opposite direction: the interest turned towards the coherence of the visual pattern itself as a vehicle for representation of the artists’ own feelings, visions and fantasies’ (Elias 2009f: 217). Like their painting and sculpting contemporaries, photographers of the late nineteenth century saw themselves as standard bearers of a new

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world view, which they contemplated through the lens of a nascent, mechanical-chemical means of reproduction (see Benjamin 2008). They sought to challenge the established conventions of the visual arts hitherto monopolised for centuries by painters and sculptors, with a shared social-­psychical compulsion to explore new opportunities for artistic expression offered by photography. They were bound up within broader social processes of the time in which self-control became ‘both the focus and the locus of external social controls’ (Wouters 2007: 199) and a ‘controlled de-controlling of emotional controls’ became a dominant mode of self-­steering with ‘third-nature’ personalities that are more reflexive and ­flexible. It was a process of informalisation with an inherent emphasis on the individualised products of artists who had greater scope and more opportunity to express their own individual vision and ideals, rather than have it entirely dictated, as it were, by the ideals of ‘good society’.

 ) Photography, Photographers and the Establishedb Outsider Dynamic During the Co-existence phase, photography blossomed as a specialist form of mechanical reproduction of reality, especially in the area of scientific research and documentation, and as a commercially viable activity, usurping the painters’ function in producing portraiture for ‘good society’. But despite the efforts of high-profile individuals who championed photography as a vehicle for genuine artistic expression, the disparate groups’ photographers formed in Europe and the United States lacked the social means necessary to mount a viable challenge to the long-­standing traditions and preconceptions of the art establishment. They were outsiders: interdependent with influential art networks, but with fewer power resources compared to members of the art establishment who were furnished with group charisma, a strong weidentity, a high degree of social cohesion and, crucially, what amounted to a monopoly definition of aesthetic appreciation that could be traced back through many generations.

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This uneven balance of power between the art establishment and photographers was in all likelihood reinforced by praise and blame gossip which served to crystallise and strengthen their own we-ideals based on the minority-of-the-best among themselves and the minority-of-the-­ worst among the outsiders, that is, the photographers who challenged their monopoly on aesthetic appreciation, or the very definition of ‘art’ as they (the establishment) saw it. More research is needed to flesh out the contours of this dynamic, but from the limited sketch above we have seen how art photography was portrayed as a refuge for those who were unable to practise ‘real’ art: painting and sculpting. Photographers with artistic pretensions were caricatured as lacking in talent, lazy and so on. While from their own outsider social position and perspective, photographers largely accepted the tenants of art laid down by the art establishment. In their desire to achieve a more influential position within this socially powerful configuration, their main productive focus was on mimicking the approach of painters and sculptors. Many of their numbers must have been keenly aware of the distinctive aesthetic potential of photography as a separate art form that could stand alongside painting and sculpture, but those within the art establishment were unwilling and, more to the point, because of their social habitus, they were unable to accept the validity of photography as art. The subsequent pattern of social development bears structural similarities of established-outsider relations more generally that have been investigated empirically by Elias and a number of researchers in the ongoing programme instigated by his approach (Elias 2013a; Elias and Scotson 2008; van Stolk and Wouters 1987a, b; Wouters 1990a; Waldhoff 1995). These studies demonstrate the consistent patterns and phases that are common features of such relationships. While their dynamics are by no means inevitable, and they are often fraught with tension and conflict, their direction is often clear in retrospect: the asymmetrical balance of power shifts in favour of the outsiders who eventually emancipate themselves to achieve greater equality (but perhaps still not equal status) in relation to the established group. This social process can even develop further to a position of parity and integration within the established, and this is precisely what happened with photographers in their shifting relationship to the art establishment in the later decades of the twentieth century.

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c) Aestheticisation and the Aesthetic Tension-Balance During the subsequent Challenge phase, photographers achieved greater group cohesion, a more focused sense of purpose and a more crystallised we-identity as photographic artists in their relationship to the art establishment. Around this time, images produced by photographic means underwent a process of aestheticisation on a much broader scale than had previously been possible. And in the status competition between painters and photographers, the accepted possibilities of expressive forms on both sides were broadened, as well as the spectrum of image-based art overall. In part, this was due to a process of informalisation that, as it were, triggered and opened up the social and psychical potential of specific groups of people, enabling them to include photographic images as bone fide works of art. Significantly, the Pictorialist photographers were motivated to create images that would evoke emotion and associations, rather than merely register objects, people and events. But it is probably a mistake to see the often highly stylised and ‘atmospheric’ images of the Pictorialists as ‘romantic’ portrayals of a pre-industrial era. This would entail a projection of sentiments that emerged later onto the past and it obscures the function these images had for the photographers who created them and the public who viewed and enjoyed them. Pictorialist images were specifically designed to invoke an enjoyable tension-balance for viewers by juxtaposing figures and shapes, colours and textures that played with and explored themes and emotions that had previously been less amenable to public viewing. The tension-balance concept is introduced by Elias and Dunning (2008) in the 1980s in the context of sports and sport-game competitions, referring to the pleasurable experience of excitement achieved when two opposing sides or players are relatively equal in skill and opportunities in the game being played. The emotional refreshment, excitement or even catharsis, generated for spectators of the game in question can ebb and flow throughout the allotted time, or rise and fall in rapid succession from moment to moment. But the ideal experience is some kind of pleasurable equilibrium that avoids the extremes of violent passion or monotonous boredom. This quality of the experience is both desired and expected by mass spectators

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of sports and sport-games in modern industrial societies. It is not an overstretch to see how this can be applied to the experience of works of art in general, and photography in particular. Thus, the extent to which one is involved or detached in responding to a work of art,6 and the sense of being pulled in one direction or the other, can result in pleasurable and/ or discomforting thoughts and feelings. These will in turn depend on the ongoing social context in which the work of art is displayed and appreciated.7 Many of the images produced by Pictorialist photographers facilitated in the viewer a novel experience: an aesthetic tension-balance. This balance is generated through a process of aestheticisation in which the development of the learned appreciation of tensions between components of a work of art can generate emotional stimulation, enjoyment and ‘refreshment’. This trained skill entails a shift in the ‘changing equilibria between sets of mental activities’ (Elias 2007b: 69). In other words, the dynamic relationships between (1) conscience, or largely automatic self-control; (2) consciousness, or the waking sense of self-steering; and (3) unconscious processes, or the drives and impulses that are mostly impervious to conscious awareness. As the balance of these relationships shifts and blends in people’s experience, their thoughts and emotions correspondingly shift to either side and on various levels along the spectrum of

 See Elias (2007b) for an extended discussion of the involvement and detachment balance. Richard Kilminster (2014) notes some similarities between the English philosopher Edward Bullough’s ideas (1912) on ‘psychical distance as a factor in art’ as a key component in aesthetic experience, and Elias’s use of the terms involvement and detachment, and he (Kilminster) further relates how Ernst Kris (1967: see especially 39) developed Bullough’s ideas on aesthetics within a psychoanalytic framework. Bullough apparently considers the ability to achieve ‘psychical distance’ to be an unchanging human trait, whereas Elias’s concept of the involvement and detachment balance is a dynamic, emergent and often consciously cultivated and nurtured property of social and psychical processes. 7  The same goes for the ‘art of love’: a quest for an exciting and satisfying lustbalance that avoids the extremes of wild passion and emotional numbness (see Wouters 1998a). 6

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involvement and detachment. On the one hand, the extent to which their experience is determined by conscience is evidence of a more ­formal, controlled and rigid mode of self-management that it is characterised by greater emotional and cognitive detachment. On the other hand, the extent to which their experience is guided by conscious reflection and an openness towards (and even positive appreciation for) unconscious impulses, is an expression of a more informal, less rigid mode of selfmanagement, but one that is nonetheless just as encompassing, even and all-round, and characterised by greater emotional involvement at the same time. Importantly, this type of self-steering does not entail the loss or removal of self-control, as is often assumed by contemporary morality-­ driven commentators, but instead represents a psychical process of controlled de-controlling of emotional controls: psychical informalisation. This even more demanding social-psychical ability occurs in waves of ­informalisation that Wouters has outlined in great detail and with reference to wide-ranging, comparative international empirical data (Wouters 2007, cf. 2010). And it seems reasonable to assume, at least in the absence of further research, that the Pictorialist photographers experienced a wave of informalisation around the turn of the nineteenth century, along with specific groups of their audience within and around the social periphery of the art establishment at the time. Ideals of beauty, naturalness and, more informal, ‘looser’ and authentic forms of self-regulation began to merge. This represented a shift in the configuration of conscience, consciousness, unconscious that gives more scope for conscious direction and an openness to the influence of unconscious processes. This merging of ideals and a new form of self-regulation is symptomatic of the spread of a third-nature personality, a typical feature of informalisation. The image-making of the Pictorialist photographers and the appreciation of them by broader segments of society from the last decades of the nineteenth century can be understood as an expression of a nascent aesthetic appreciation that involved a social and psychical pressure towards authentic personal expression. The art created served a newly emerging aesthetic tension-balance. Like their more established competitors (painters and sculptors) before them, Pictorialist photographers were able to strike what for them and their public was an enjoyable balance between the emphasis on purity and naturalness on the

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one hand, and with what they experienced as personal, impressionistic or subjective on the other. In part, the outsider status of photographers and photography during the Challenge phase can partly be understood in terms of an inability among those within the art establishment to translate the aesthetic tension-­balance that was expected and enjoyed through the established media of paint and carved stone onto mechanically produced photographic imagery. In other words, photography had not yet undergone a process of aestheticisation that painters and sculptors had experienced during the preceding two millennia. Seen from this perspective, the resistance towards photography shown by the art establishment is easier to grasp. It is an example of a lag in social habitus that is attuned to secondnature ideals of more formalised, socially controlled and consciencedriven self-­ regulation that is typical of second-nature personality structures. But while these developments were enough to position photographic images as aesthetically viable in the eyes of some members of the art establishment, they did not qualify them for unconditional entry to the world of art. For this to eventually happen, photographic image-making had first to emancipate itself from the ideals and practices of paint and stone-­based artistic expression.

d) Formalisation and Photographic Realism From around the 1930s, the Emancipation phase in the development of photography as art was characterised by a renewed focus on the qualities of photographic reproduction that were clearly distinct from those of painting and sculpture. The aesthetic tension-balance developed by photographers and their audiences began to encompass lived experience within its frame of reference. The emphasis on photographic realism captured the imagination and sensibilities of a new generation of photographers, all of course still working in monochrome, who were inspired to distance themselves and their work from the Pictorialists and much of what they stood for. Here we see the pendulum swing of artistic production from the more emotionally involved process and results of Pictorialism, towards a more detached, cognitively driven, methodical

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and controlled process and resulting imagery. The constellation of psychic functions—conscience, consciousness, unconscious—shifts their dynamic relationship to amplify detachment, while at the same time, facilitating a degree of managed or controlled emotional involvement that enables both the mental and physical dexterity needed for the production of artistic photographic images, and the degree of emotional openness and engagement needed for the enjoyment of those images as art by individuals in an audience who view the work hanging on a gallery wall or through the pages of a print publication. The assertive sense of self-expression, an individualistic drive that characterised this phase encouraged practitioners to idealise pre-meditation, discipline, control and meticulous process in photographic production. The demands of conscience reasserted themselves in the service of emancipating photography as a relatively autonomous art form within the art establishment. The modernist photographers, some of whom were previously committed Pictorialists, and some of whom went on to form Group f/64, represented a part-process of formalisation within a much broader process that was encompassing Europe and the United States from roughly the 1930s onwards.

e) Monochrome and the Quest for Authenticity From the early 1960s, the Integration phase in the development of photography signals the widespread acceptance of the practice within the art establishment in Europe and the United States. By this time the aestheticisation process in photography was broad enough to encompass images depicting ‘real’ lived experience and found objects in conventional black & white, as well as the newly emerging challenge from photographers who switched to creating colour images. The ongoing competitive dialogue and tension between painters and photographers continues to this day, but it continues more or less within the parameters of an art establishment whose members themselves have experienced and live according to more informalised social codes of behaviour and emotion management. By the middle of the twentieth century, having experienced a smaller wave of informalisation before World War I, members of the art

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establishment re-orientated to accept photography among its ranks, alongside painting, sculpture and performance art. Seen from the longer-term sociological perspective presented here, and with the help of the concepts of formalisation and informalisation, the role of monochrome within fine art photography becomes clearer. Black & white photographic image-making provides a connection to a revered tradition of artistic creativity. For many years, monochrome was the only option available to all photographers, including those who sought to produce art. The medium served the realist photographers well in their successful attempt to emancipate photography from the paint- and sculpture-driven conception of art prevalent in the art establishment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they forged a more autonomous role for photography as art, the commercial success of colour film and smaller cameras increasingly led people beyond the art ­establishment to question the black & white style of visual representation: many of them considered it to be ‘unrealistic’ and old-fashioned. In this context, from within the art establishment, black & white served as a marker of distinction from the rising tide of crass commercialism found in the colour advertisements of glossy magazines, and the unreflective activities of the amateur image-making masses whose brightly saturated snapshots served as fodder for the family album. For many in the art establishment, colour represented a slippery slope into the commercial abyss, and as such, it was resisted and sometimes vehemently derided. The broader wave of informalisation that swept across Europe and the United States from the 1960s onwards brought with it a stronger emphasis on the individual and his or her own imperatives in the creation of artistic imagery. A fresher, more open and even playful approach emerged, through which colour and black & white were initially pitted one against the other, but eventually placed alongside each other as equally valid choices in the creative process of photographic art. The inherent qualities of black & white vis-à-vis colour that I mentioned at the beginning—the more fundamental dimensions of an image, a focus on line, form, contrast, tone and texture—now serve to connect fine art photography to a we-ideal of painters and sculptors that once permeated and dominated the art establishment. Since the much broader

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and more encompassing process of informalisation became dominant in the West through the 1960s and 1970s, and for some time already before that, the emphasis on line, form, contrast, tone and texture is frequently used to justify the artistic status of any photographic image, not just those that are produced in black & white. But this focus on the more fundamental, underlying and direct components of a photographic medium—from visualisation to production to the viewing experience of the audience—is particularly revealing of the contemporary significance and appeal of black & white within the art establishment of the early twenty-first century. To a large extent monochrome image-making symbolises a quest for authenticity. From the evidence available (Wouters 2007, here Chapter 4), such a quest is often a conspicuous feature of social processes of informalisation, as various groups seek to differentiate their own more forward-­ thinking, progressive, emotionally freer and more direct approach in their relationships with others and the world around them, from those they perceive to be old-fashioned, hypocritical, emotionally stiff and overly controlling. Whatever people point to and experience as ‘authentic’ will change over time, but for art photographers and those who enjoy their work, black & white provides them with a sense of connection to an authentic tradition of visual art that they imbue with the power to transcend the distraction, superficial appeal, humdrum everydayness and even vulgarity, of colour in their search for a more enjoyable balance of tensions—an aesthetic tension-balance—which they create and experience with images of fine art photography.

8 Informalisation and Brutalisation: Jihadism as a Part-Process of Global Integration and Disintegration Michael Dunning

8.1 Introduction1 We wage war against you to stop you from spreading your disbelief and debauchery—your secularism and nationalism, your perverted liberal values, your Christianity and atheism—and all the depravity and corruption they entail. (Dabiq 2016) In this chapter I examine the relationships between Salafi-jihadism (in particular that associated with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]) and connections between the processes of brutalisation, integration and disintegration, and informalisation. By drawing on the work of Elias, Wouters and the figurational tradition, I seek to show how, as part of long-term social processes that have extended across the globe, there has been an equalisation of power chances between many groups (albeit with an array of ‘criss-crossing’ counter-trends and fluctuations), and how this has contributed to a loss of functions, status and meaning for some which  Great thanks go to Cas Wouters, Andrew Linklater and  Stephen Vertigans, who very kindly commented on and made suggestions for how to improve this chapter. 1

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has driven integration conflicts. This, in turn, has been central to brutalisation processes, which feed Salafi-jihadist ideology and organisations like ISIS. As a consequence of global civilising processes, which most recently have been dominated by European civilising processes (see Linklater 2016: 442), increasing numbers of people have become more interdependent. As previously disparate social groups have become more closely interrelated, their integration has functioned as a condition for the spread of informalised behavioural standards across the world, which is related to a range of emancipatory movements of women, children, the formerly colonised and less rigid attitudes towards such groups. As these processes continue and some groups lose functions and status (e.g. vanquished military groups and many tradition-orientated groups across the world), integration conflicts break out, along with associated decivilising spurts and brutalisation processes. In order to explore these processes, I use empirical data from ISIS’s online magazine Dabiq (including the quote that opens this chapter) and other influential Salafi-jihadist literature. This data does not, however, show specific diachronic changes in the development of Salafi-jihadism. Rather, it helps to provide insights into the emergence and development of established-­outsider relations between Salafi-jihadists and the West2, as part of broader processes of long-term global integration. In this sense it is what Elias called a ‘configurational analysis and synopsis’ (Elias and Scotson 2008: 49). This data helps to demonstrate that global integration is not a unilinear process, but one that involves movements in both integrating and disintegrating directions. Accordingly, the analysis of brutalisation processes as an example of the latter is crucial to developing our understanding of the problem of civilising and decivilising trends.

 I use the term ‘the West’ to refer to the parts of the world in which state formation processes and the ‘standard of civilisation’ are dominated by European, and more recently North American monopolisation processes and nation states (see Elias 2012: 471). The term ‘the West’ is not fixed, is open to interpretation, and can be controversial. I acknowledge this, and so use the term as a shorthand to refer to a large section of the nation states that consider themselves as an elite, as part of a complex nexus of global established-outsider relations. 2

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The chapter begins with an explanation of how global social processes, such as increasing global integration and informalisation, have contributed to the growth of Salafi-jihadism. I then show how Salafi-jihadists have sought to fight back against the spread of Western behavioural standards by seeking to stigmatise the West. Such codes, for groups like ISIS, are proof that the West is ‘immoral’ and ‘rotten to the core’. I then explore the relationship between this stigmatisation, Salafi-jihadist extreme violence and brutalisation of Salafi-jihadists in both Iraq and the West.

8.2 G  lobal Social Processes and the Growth of Salafi-Jihadism He caressed my neck with the blade but kept talking: “Feel it? Cold, isn’t it? Can you imagine the pain you’ll feel when it cuts? Unimaginable pain. The first hit will severe your veins. The blood mixes with your saliva. The second blow opens your neck. You wouldn’t be able to breathe through your nose at this stage, just your throat. You’d make some amusing guttural sounds—I’ve seen it before, you all squirm like animals, like pigs. The third blow will take off your head. I’d put it on your back.” Then he drew his pistol from his leather holster and placed it against my head and pulled the trigger three times. Click. Click. Click. It’s called a mock execution. But not even this terrifying intimidation seemed to satisfy him. (Verkaik 2016: 162–163) The quote at the opening of this chapter and this one are typical of two core aspects of Salafi-jihadism: the first one is from ISIS’s magazine Dabiq and stigmatises the West as immoral. The second is taken from a hostage of the infamous ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’ (Mohammed Emwazi) and demonstrates ISIS’s extreme violence and brutality. But what is it that links these two aspects of Salafi-jihadism together, and how is it that such extreme violence has become commonplace in the armoury of Salafi-jihadists? How have these people become brutal? Pleasure in the cruelty and destruction of others is a way of being that is often associated with the Middle Ages. Most people today, across the world, would find the kind of violence undertaken in Europe (and else-

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where) during the Middle Ages to be repugnant (see Elias 2012a: 15). Similar feelings of revulsion are felt, across the globe, in relation to the extreme violence undertaken by ISIS and other Salafi-jihadists groups. Therefore, it is not simply an attempt at stigmatisation when Salafi-­ jihadist groups like ISIS are referred to as medieval-like. There are clear parallels between ISIS and the levels and kinds of violence undertaken in the medieval period, which are usually regarded as incompatible with ‘civilised’ behavioural standards. For example, Salafi-jihadists, such as ISIS, openly promote and talk about violence in the form of public executions (as during the Middle Ages) and through images and video on the internet without apparent feelings of shame and repugnance. During the Middle Ages, suggests Elias (2012a: 188–190), pleasure in killing and cruelty was also socially permitted and that to a certain extent the social structure of the time made such behaviour seem necessary (Elias 2012a: 189). The same is the case for Salafi-jihadist groups like ISIS who seek to justify as necessary, their cruelty and killing through their interpretations of texts, both Salafi-jihadist specifically and Islamic more generally. The promotion of their extreme violence on the internet can also be regarded as an attempt to shock people around the world who have come to see such violence as repugnant. As will become apparent later in the chapter, Salafi-jihadists (and potential recruits) often experience a loss of functions, status and meaning in their lives, which contributes to their seeking meaning and status through war and violence. The function of living for war among Salafi-jihadists can be demonstrated through their conception of the term jihad,3 which put simply (for Salafi-jihadists) means ‘fighting’. According to Maher (2016: 32) this is a physical struggle in the name of God and regarded by Salafi-jihadists as the pinnacle of Islam. The ISIS online magazine, Dabiq, highlights the centrality of violence for Salafi-jihadists with a headline: ‘Islam is the religion of the sword’. Extreme violence is clearly a central aspect of Salafi-jihadism and is distinct from what most people regard as acceptable behavioural standards. But Salafi-jihadists also stand in opposition to what they regard as  See Vertigans (2009) for a more expansive discussion of this concept.

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‘immoral’ Western attitudes. For example, they make proclamations and rules against ‘Western’ approaches to women’s rights, sex and sexuality, drug use and many other areas that have involved a loosening of social constraints in the West over the past century—essentially what are more informalised behavioural standards. Salafi-jihadist punishments for transgressing these rules are often severe and violent. We can understand this opposition, in part, as a defence against global integration processes and associated loss of status, meaning and function. That global integration processes contribute to the development of Salafi-jihadism runs counter to the argument that there is a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the Christian West and Muslim East (Huntington 1996: 209). It also goes beyond claims that Salafi-jihadism is simply a consequence of and reaction to forces of globalisation and the spread of Western culture (Barber 1992; Bjorgo 2005; Coker 2002; Cooper 2005; Hess 2003; Lizardo 2006). Such accounts, especially the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, tend to regard this Salafi-jihadist-West ‘double-bind’ (see Elias 2007b) problem as one of competing ideologies or belief-systems. They do not take into account how power structures and the development of relationships between the West, the Middle East and various other parts of the world have been central to the development of ­Salafi-jihadism and the extreme violence undertaken by groups such as ISIS. Accordingly, two important questions to ask are how is it that Salafi-­ jihadists, such as ISIS, have come to regard extreme forms of violence as so central to their being, especially when this appears to be at odds with the behavioural standards of most people, and to what extent have they gone through a process of rejecting ‘civilised’ values? And, relatedly, how is it that over recent decades Salafi-jihadists, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS, have risen to global prominence as they seek to attack and defend themselves against what they regard as Western immorality and its corrupting influence? On the surface, much of these differences appear to add credence to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, or the idea that ISIS is protecting traditional beliefs against the cultural imperialism of the West. However, such accounts tend to regard the problem as a clash between two static competing ideologies

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rather than as part of a complex set of integration processes and disintegrative ‘part-processes’.4 In fact, there is a general consensus, among governments, academics and general populations, that those individuals and groups who join Salafi-­jihadist groups such as ISIS and carry out the kinds of atrocities the world has witnessed over recent years have been ‘radicalised’. But the concept of ‘radicalisation’ is also not without its problems. Chief among them is an assumption that people become radicalised by being indoctrinated into an ideology. The supposition from this is that the atrocities are driven by ideology and that this process somehow exists within a vacuum, without consideration of the figurational dynamics within which these atrocities take place, so it is as if the ‘problem’ is wholly cognitive and could be solved by reeducation or ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes. This kind of thinking relates quite closely to the ‘clash of civilisation thesis’ in which competing ideologies are blamed for the conflicts between interdependent groups. The process of radicalisation in this sense is one of joining a competing ideology. This problem is not dissimilar to that of Elias’s (2007b: 156–157) when he discussed the relationship between the superpowers during the Cold War. Elias stated that the drift towards empire building of the Soviet Union and the United States had little to do with the ‘social ideals of communism and capitalism’, and had much more to do with the structural characteristics of the two superpowers’ interdependence, or the ‘double-bind’ within which they were both enmeshed. The idea that the Cold War was a conflict around ideologies or social beliefs, according to Elias, masked the role played by structural characteristics of this inter-state relationship. In a similar way, a focus on the ideology of Salafi-jihadists, and the concept of radicalisation, masks the figurational dynamics through which groups like ISIS come into being and undertake extreme violence. Central are processes of integration, equalisation and informalisation.

 The importance of this point should not be underestimated, as it demonstrates that blaming religion or ideologies for violence and conflict is an oversimplification. 4

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8.3 Integration, Equalisation and Informalisation In On the Process of Civilisation Elias (2012a) demonstrates that civilising processes involve, over the long term, a shift in the balance of constraints, due to increasing external constraints, towards ‘internal’ self-restraints. People who have been subject to this process tend to have ‘personality structures’ that are more even, with greater levels of foresight, mutual identification and rationalisation, and have a high threshold of shame and repugnance in relation to violence, sex and other bodily functions. And these processes are interdependent with broader structural processes of social integration and disintegration, such as state formation. Elias (2012a) suggested that societies can be dominated by either disintegrative or integrative competitive pressures, although the balance between the two is constantly changing. When the former are in the ascendance, societies fail to develop strong centralised monopolies of violence and taxation. When the latter are in the ascendance, centralised and integrative monopolies of violence and taxation are formed and strengthened. Integration processes have contributed over the very long term, to the growth in length and complexity of chains of interdependence. Most recently, this has seen Western states dominate global power relations. It is important, however, to recognise that civilising processes co-exist with decivilising processes (Elias 2013a; Fletcher 1997: 82; Dunning 2016: 45) and that decivilising processes involve structural disintegration (Wouters 2016b) or centrifugal forces, including the kinds of brutalisation processes discussed in this chapter. The complexity and interdependence of these processes are summed up by Elias: On a smaller scale there are the most diverse criss-cross movements, shifts and spurts in this or that direction. But if we consider the movement over large time spans, we see clearly how the compulsions arising directly from the threat of weapons and physical force have gradually diminished, and how those forms of dependency which lead to the regulation of the affects in the form of self-control gradually increased…

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If the whole many-layered fabric of historical development is considered, however, the movement is seen to be infinitely…complex. In each phase there are numerous fluctuations, frequent advances or recessions of the internal and external constraints. (Elias 2012a: 181–182) Elias (2013a) and Wouters (2007) have shown how related structural changes in society and changes in codes of behaviour and feeling were tied to emancipatory movements during the twentieth century. Central to this are ‘changing balances of power between established and outsider groups of the most diverse kinds’ (Elias 2013a: 27). In a number of cases, the power ratios between groups have lessened, and these include between men and women, older and younger generations, European societies and the rest of the world (including former colonies), and rulers and ruled. This evening-up of power ratios between groups is what Elias (2012b: 63–64) has referred to as functional democratisation, in which different groups become more functionally dependent upon one another and therefore more closely integrated. Accordingly, as power ratios between established and outsider5 groups are reduced, the tendency is towards ‘diminishing contrasts’ in behavioural standards and the psychic make-up of these different groups6 (see Elias 2012b: 63–64; Wouters 2007). But as I argue in this chapter, this closer integration and diminishing of contrasts in behavioural standards are the processes that Salafi-jihadist groups like ISIS are opposed to. What are considered as ‘informalised’ behavioural standards in the West are regarded as immoral by Salafi-jihadists.7 In fact, Salafi-­jihadists use what they see as Western immorality as a way to try to stigmatise Westerners.

 See Elias’s (2008) ‘theoretical essay’ on established-outsider relations in his and John Scotson’s study The Established and the Outsiders. 6  See Elias’s (2012a: 422) discussion of ‘Diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties, and Wouters examination of this in Chapter 5 of this book. 7  Such opposition to informalised behavioural standards are not confined to Salafi-jihadists. But they do represent one of the most extreme and prominent examples. 5

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The evening-up of power chances between groups and emancipation processes have contributed to a mixing of different social strata8 and the development of more informal behavioural standards, albeit placing greater pressure on the psychic self-steering apparatus of individuals— involving a shift from conscience to consciousness (see Wouters 2007: 213, and Chapter 6 of this book). According to Wouters (2007: 181), since the 1960s, processes of informalisation have spread to increasing numbers of people, particularly in the West, and now increasingly across the globe. Wouters (2007: 185) adds that in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘Sexuality, the written and spoken language, clothing, music, dancing, and hairstyles—all expressions—exhibited the trend towards informality’. And that: ‘…it gradually came to be taken for granted by more and more socially rising groups of outsiders—workers, women, children, teenagers, homosexuals—that changes for the better were to be expected’. It is these very processes that Salafi-jihadists are opposing because they are associated with losses of function, status and meaning for them. They associate their functions, status and meaning much more closely with ‘traditional values’ and looser forms of global integration. Processes of functional democratisation and the widening spiral process of informalisation (see Wouters 2007: 184) as part of greater human integration and emancipation are central to the positions Salafi-jihadists and potential recruits find themselves in, as they involve a loss of function and challenge the power positions of traditional male elites. As already suggested, over the long term, there has been an evening-up of power chances between the former colonies and European colonial powers, which has been most visible in the process of decolonisation (see Dunning 2014: 159, 192). That is, as states around the world have become more closely entwined in their interdependence, Western states have become more functionally dependent on the former colonies within the context of ‘post-colonial’ power dynamics. A good example of this is the global trading network. Another is the former colonies that have become sover See Dunning and Sheard (2005: 61) for a discussion of what they called embourgeoisement in nineteenth century England, as an example of this. 8

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eign members of international society whose views have to be taken into account, although are often ignored. But related to this are the competitive entanglements that states find themselves in, and how this has contributed to the reduction in power gradients between certain states. For example, many states across the world have become more functionally dependent on countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, because of the oil reserves these countries hold. Losing access to these resources could put a state at a competitive disadvantage in relation to its rivals, and so the power potential of somewhere like Saudi Arabia is elevated. Related to the evening-up of power gradients is a reduction in contrasts between people (as discussed above) on a global scale. Elias (2012a: 424–425) suggests that as Western ‘civilised patterns of conduct’ are spread over wider areas of the world, then the West has come to be seen as a ‘kind of upper class’. This spread happened through colonisation (and neo-colonialism) and an assimilation of the ‘upper strata of other nations’, in the same way that models of conduct spread from the upper strata (courtly and commercial centres) to lower levels in the West itself. Central to these processes are the ‘social functions with which individuals must comply, [which] are increasingly changing in such a way as to induce the same constant foresight and affect-control as in the West itself ’. A key part of this for Elias, as mentioned above, is that it is the competitive pressures between Western peoples that are bringing about changes in other parts of the world in line with Western standards. ‘They are making large parts of the world dependent on them, and at the same time—in keeping with the regularity of functional differentiation that has been observed over and again—are themselves dependent on these parts’. Associated with this is the spread of Western ideas about the nature of civilisation, which were internalised by many groups that thought of themselves as inferior (see Linklater 2016, 2019). Related to this is a process described by Linklater (2016: 443) in which from the early to mid-nineteenth century the gradient in power differentials between the colonisers and colonised began to decline. This eveningup of power chances between established and outsider groups gives ­ outsiders more opportunity to challenge established groups (Elias and Scotson 2008: 7; Dunning 2014: 26). When power differentials are so

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great, outsiders are less able to challenge established groups. Accordingly, the power differentials between the West and Salafi-jihadists are not so uneven as to prevent the latter challenging the former. For example, groups in the Middle East, like ISIS, are able to recruit in the West. At the same time, Linklater (2016: 444) argues that the opposition to the West by groups like Salafi-jihadists can be understood as part of the often traumatic encounters9 since the beginning of the colonial period between such groups and ‘European invaders’. Referring to (Kull 2011), he suggests: “Anti-Western” social movements that proclaim the superiority of “traditional” belief-systems are hardly a surprising reaction to a European civilising process that legitimised, and was shaped by, colonial violence and calculated strategies of humiliation. (Linklater 2016: 444) This has important implications for how we understand the reaction of Salafi-jihadists in relation to the global spread of informalised behavioural codes. As already noted, processes of functional democratisation, on a global scale, are interdependent with the emancipation of former outsiders and subjugated groups, including animals, women, children, homosexuals and non-Westerners. However, these emancipatory movements are associated with the West and its earlier subjugation of former colonies. For example, it is not difficult to imagine how the emancipation of women and homosexuals, and the spreading of values associated with this could be regarded by groups holding ‘traditional values’ as further attempts at undermining and humiliating them, by forcing what they see as Western values and (im)morality onto them. Associated with this is the loss of status that some groups feel (especially those with already relatively

 Elias discusses an ‘informalisation spurt’ in Studies on the Germans (2013a: 83–84) in which he shows how colonialism led to the ‘rapid destruction of the ways of life that gave meaning and value’ to people in South America during the colonial period. He points out that even centuries later the indigenous population has still not recovered from the trauma of colonialism. 9

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low status) when formerly outsider groups (e.g. women and homosexuals) increase their power potential.

8.4 S  alafi-Jihadists and the Stigmatisation of the West As the earlier example shows, rejection of informalised behavioural standards is evident in a great deal of Salafi-jihadist literature, which claims the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of the West. Proclamations against what they see as Western ‘immorality’ are commonplace and in many cases can be understood as attempts at (counter) stigmatising Westerners (see Sutton and Vertigans 2005: 153). This stigmatisation has little or no effect on the ‘established’ West, as the power chance differentials between Salafi-­ jihadists and Western states are so hugely in favour of the latter. However, this stigmatisation and building up of a ‘collective blame-fantasy’ (Elias and Scotson 2008: 21) does have an effect on Salafi-jihadists (and potential recruits). It helps to bind them closer together, giving them a sense of special virtue and ‘group charisma’ (Elias and Scotson 2008: 8) compared to the West, and a warrior ‘charisma’, which seems out of place in ‘post-­ military’ societies. At the same time, it becomes part of a process of dehumanising Westerners, who they see as lacking these special virtues. This dehumanisation has also been apparent in Iraq and Syria when it comes to the way ISIS deals with its hostages (as the earlier quote shows) and those who do not adhere to its highly formalised and authoritarian approach to Islam, and who as a result are treated with severity and violence. It is important to note that the (counter) stigmatisation of the West is often seen by Salafi-jihadists and Islamists, more generally, through the lens of Western double-standards—they are stigmatised by the West as violent and immoral, but then witness Western military interventions in Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The stigmatisation of the West by Salafi-jihadists is not new. Sutton and Vertigans (2005: 153) claim that the Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, was the first ‘influential radical Muslim to stigmatise Western civilisation and the United States in particular’. In a pamphlet named The America I have Seen, written after he visited America in 1948, Qutb states:

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I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people. And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed mankind from animals. (Archiveorg 2018) Qutb also discusses ‘America’s view of death’ and mourning (see Wouters Chapter 4 in this book for a European example of mourning) and describes how during a funeral for the ‘head of a household’ the mourners made jokes and laughed about the dead man. He suggests that this showed no respect. The more informalised approach to death in America was clearly a shock to Qutb and aroused feelings of disgust in him, as he did not have the psychic apparatus to relate to that particular social standard—it appeared alien and ‘uncivilised’ to him. Qutb also discussed what he referred to as the ‘sexual primitiveness in America’ and that ‘For Americans sexual relations have always conformed to the laws of the jungle’ and, seemed, therefore animalic and lacking in the self-restraint he expected. Without any comprehension of American civilising and informalisation processes Qutb could only see a group of ‘primitive outsiders’, who are less ‘civilised’ than his we-group. This belief in Americans being less civilised and primitive suggests that Qutb also regarded them as less human than his we-group. Qutb’s views of America and the West have been taken on by Salafi-jihadists and help to feed into their narrative, and that of people like Huntington, that there is a clash of civilisations. But a more reality-oriented explanation can be found in processes of functional democratisation, informalisation and associated integration conflicts. It is useful to note that this is a similar view raised by Wouters (1998b) in which the Dutch during the inter-war years and the Vietnamese in the 1990s sought to protect themselves from American informalised lifestyles. Accordingly: Towards the end of 1995, the authorities in Vietnam started a national campaign against what was called ‘negative foreign influences.’ ‘American cultural imperialism’ in particular, was considered to be a serious threat to ‘traditional morals.’ In the 1920s and 1930s, many

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European authorities used to speak a similar language. A Dutch government committee, for instance, warned in 1931 against the ‘demoralizing Americanization of Europe.’ The poison was localized predominantly in the lower abdomen of America: under the influence of negroes and popular negro music, in our country too the most primitive feelings could gain the upper hand’. (Wouters 1998b: 131) As stated, Qutb’s view of the West is common among Salafi-jihadists and Islamists. For example, Maher (2016: 175) cites the founder of Jamaat e-Islami, Abul A’la Maududi as saying: ‘Islam is the very antithesis of secular Western Democracy’. Maher adds, ‘Secularism was equated [by Maududi and Jamaat e-Islami] with numerous social problems of which the two most important were exploitation and moral decay’. There are similar themes expressed in the ISIS online magazine Dabiq. In one article, headlined ‘Clamping down of sexual deviance’, we can see how ISIS rails against the more informalised codes of conduct in the West. The article claims that after the sexual revolution the West ‘spiralled’ downward towards sexual deviance and immorality. This, says the article, caused rampant sexual disease (including AIDS) and the end of the nuclear family. The article goes on to protest against homosexuality and gay marriage. It concludes by reporting that ISIS punished a man for sodomy (homosexuality) by throwing him from a high roof, stoned a woman to death for adultery and flogged a man for being in possession of pornography. The article is accompanied by photographs of this ­violence. Another Dabiq article talks about Europe being promiscuous and that the emancipation of women is wrong. In a further article, ISIS states: ‘Why we hate you and why we fight you’ and goes on to justify an attack on a Florida nightclub as an attack on ‘sodomites’, and says that they have been commanded by God to terrorise disbelievers. It then lists why ISIS hates the West, which includes not believing in God; what ISIS refers to liberal filthy sins such as ‘gay rights’, alcohol, drugs, fornication and gambling; atheism; ‘crimes against muslims’; ‘invading their lands’; mocking and ‘vilifying’ ISIS, and Muslims more generally. These punishments and proclamations against the West clearly suggest that the informal codes of behaviour in the West and elsewhere in the world are regarded as a threat by ISIS. They are the antithesis of what ISIS

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believes and stands for, and according to ISIS need to be fought against and banished from the Muslim world. The views among Salafi-jihadists that the West is ‘morally corrupt’ and ‘decadent’ have been, in part, used to justify attacks on the West. For example, following the attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, ISIS issued a statement, claiming that the killers were acting under the guidance of Allah and that Paris is the capital of ‘prostitution and vice’, that it has ‘filthy streets and alleys’, and that French people are ‘crusaders’. It claimed that the people who attended the concert at the Bataclan theatre were ‘idolators gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice’ (Corcoran 2015 quoted in Dunning 2016: 44). Such views are not dissimilar to those held by the West of people around the world they considered to be ‘savages’ during the colonial period. This dehumanising of peoples that the colonisers considered as ‘uncivilised’ provided justification for violent civilising offensives. These are the very processes referred to above by Linklater, which are central to the subsequent development of anti-Western social movements.

8.5 ISIS Brutality The stigmatisation and dehumanisation of their enemies is of fundamental importance to the extreme violence and moral judgement that Salafi-­ jihadists undertake. As has been demonstrated, the people who they are directing their violence against are regarded by them as less than human. The justification for this violence is set out in a variety of Salafi-jihadist texts. For example, a book titled The Management of Savagery written by Egyptian jihadist, Abu Bakr Naji in 2004, is claimed by its translator, William McCants, to provide a text of justifications for much of ISIS’s brutality (Neumann 2016: 67). This state of savagery, says Neumann, is a period of ‘chaos’ after ‘revolutionaries’ have provoked an overreaction from the state. This is much like the US reaction to 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, and 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Management of Savagery states that the worst kind of savagery is not worse than stable rule under the ‘unbelievers’. It says that modern civilisation is that of Satan, that it is full of ‘moral corruption’ and that ‘Islamic state’ aims to end states living together with mutual interests. This is a clear example of

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a written Salafi-jihadist doctrine which actively opposes global integration10 and accompanying informalised behavioural standards. The Management of Savagery’s prescriptions on violence include justifying killing civilians in the West, if it is part of jihad, and adds that jihad is violence, massacring and terrorism, and that these tactics should be used on the ‘infidels’ (kafir or unbeliever). The book also offers justifications for burning people alive and of the need to massacre others. This text, along with many other ISIS proclamations, including another lengthy tome, The Jurisprudence of Blood, justifies extreme violence, which shows the level of brutalisation that the authors and adherents of these doctrines have undergone, while at the same time showing how deeply entwined they are in established-outsider relations with the West and their other enemies. Words like ‘infidels’ and ‘filth’ demonstrate the extent of the dehumanisation of their enemies. This kind of dehumanising is a regularity of established-outsider relationships and feeds into feelings of superiority and violence. Writing about terrorism in Germany, Elias suggests that young people who formed terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s derived a sense of power and superiority from their destructiveness and violence (2013a: 489). It is clear that ISIS, too, derives a sense of power and superiority from their extreme violence and destructiveness. At the same time, for Salafi-jihadists, fighting and ‘jihad’ must continue until the ‘day of judgement’ (Maher 2016: 39; McCants 2015: 102). ISIS extreme violence, and the flaunting of it in magazines and on the internet, has a number of important implications, as do the doctrines expressed in The Management of Savagery and The Jurisprudence of Blood. For example, it shows that the external rules and prohibitions around violence and aggression that have become internalised (Elias 2012a: 187) in many people around the world, to varying degrees, appear to be absent or greatly diminished in the psychic make-up of those committing this extreme violence, and among those who regard it as necessary to their cause. Elias suggests the following: 10  There are many examples of doctrines across the world which encapsulate this opposition to global integration. Brexit in the United Kingdom is one such example, as is the isolationism of US president Donald Trump.

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In the modern age, cruelty and joy in the destruction and torment of others, like the proof of physical superiority, have been placed under an increasingly strong social control anchored in the state organisation. All these forms of pleasure, hemmed in by threats of displeasure, have gradually come to express themselves only indirectly, in a “refined” form. And only at times of social upheaval or where social control is looser (for example in colonial regions) do they break out more directly, uninhibitedly, less impeded by shame and repugnance. (Elias 2012a: 187) An examination of brutalisation processes as tacitly suggested by Elias’s quote above will follow. But first I will explore some of the broader social processes that provide context to this problem.

8.6 Integration Conflicts and Defunctionalisation As discussed above, Salafi-jihadist attempts at stigmatising and dehumanising the West together with its extreme violence are linked to greater global integration and the spreading of Western behavioural standards. But this integration is also associated with a corresponding loss of functions (defunctionalisation) and status for certain groups, which has contributed to what Wouters (2007: 196) and Linklater (2016: 420) have described as integration conflicts. It is growing interdependence and functional dependence between groups in the West and the rest of the world that is contributing to this loss of functions and status for many groups (in both the West and the rest of the world) as these interdependencies become more tightly and complexly woven together. According to Wouters (see Chapter 5 of this book), the simultaneousness of a reduction in power potential between all groups, and the loss of function and status of some, means that functional democratisation should be seen as a ‘balance-concept’. By viewing the development of humanity as a whole over the long term, it is apparent that, along with greater integration, there is, on the one hand, an evening-up of the power potential between the former

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colonisers and colonised. But, on the other hand, especially if shorterterm trends are taken into account, there is a growing inequality between the very richest in the world and the rest of humanity, and as part of both of these aspects there are a range of ‘criss-crossing’ processes such as the emancipation of certain groups and a loss of function and status for others. As Dunning and Mennell (1998: 343) suggest, the overall trend of human integration and disintegration is: ‘…multilevelled, involving a balance of movements and counter-movements’. There are numerous examples of defunctionalisation as part of processes of functional democratisation on the global plane. For instance, in the West, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, large numbers of the former industrial working classes have lost functions and status as manufacturing has been ‘globalised’ and relocated to poorer parts of the world (see Wouters this book Chapter 5). At the same time, there are many other groups that have experienced a loss of function, status and meaning. These include, as will be discussed below, many of those people around the world, but particularly in the Middle East and the West who become Salafi-jihadists: for example, former members of the Iraq’s Ba’ath Party following its disbandment but also people in the West, who as part of global integration processes have suffered a loss in function, status and meaning. This can pass down through generations. For example, the children and grandchildren of immigrants may suffer such a loss of function, meaning and status relating to the loss of prestige that many of their parents and grandparents would have felt based on the diminished role of traditional value systems in the secular West (See Bracher 2009: 97). Many integration conflicts seem to be closely linked to this loss of function and status, and what Elias referred to as the ‘drag effect’: [The] resistance to the merging of one’s own survival unit with a larger unit—or its disappearance into that unit—is undoubtedly due in large part to a particular feeling. It is the feeling that the fading or disappearance of a tribe or state as an autonomous entity would render meaningless everything which past generations had achieved and suffered in the framework and in the name of this survival unit. (Elias 2010b: 199)

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This suggests that the development of groups like ISIS is partially, at least, an example of this drag effect on traditional survival units. Associated with this integration is the sense that the ‘we-identity’ of the groups being subsumed into a larger entity is about to be lost and these groups lose function, status and meaning. For example, it is perhaps not surprising that Salafi-jihadist preachers rail against what they see as a Godless, secular West. If such values were to envelop their societies, they would be rendered functionless, and everything that once gave meaning to their lives would become meaningless. It should not be unexpected, therefore, that Salafi-jihadists and people in those parts of the world in which religious establishments have relatively high power chances might be fearful of a loss of function and status considering the loss of function and authority of religious establishments and their influence on daily behaviour and attitudes in large parts of the West. The brutal reaction to informalised behavioural standards, therefore, is also a reaction against loss of function, status and meaning. This loss is crucial to processes of brutalisation among Salafi-jihadists and potential recruits. In fact, as suggested at the beginning of this chapter it is through war and violence that Salafi-jihadists develop a sense of meaning and status in order to compensate for this loss of status and meaning elsewhere, and this is justified and codified in a number of texts and proclamations discussed above. Associated with the meaning and status that Salafi-jihadists gain through violence is a process of brutalisation. This process is paradigmatic in the sense that it demonstrates (again) that the problem of Salafijihadism is directly related to processes of integration and disintegration, rather than to ideology, as concepts like ‘radicalisation’ suggest.

8.7 Brutalisation as a Paradigmatic Process Ideology is secondary in the development of (albeit not unrelated to nor separate from) Salafi-jihadists’ violence. The concept of brutalisation, however, allows for a better examination of the interdependence between social and psychic changes, and does not assume that ideology is the main or sole driver contributing to the kinds of violence associated with Salafi-­ jihadist groups like ISIS.

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Processes of brutalisation, apparent in all parts of the world, are connected everywhere with the overall long-term trend of greater human integration. They are processes that, if they are to gain the ascendency over civilising processes, tend to push the overall direction of societal development in a decivilising direction.11 In the case of Salafi-jihadists, it appears that their brutalisation is at least partially a consequence of functional integration and unintended defunctionalisation. They, in turn, fight against what they see as informalised behavioural standards, which for them appear to be what is threatening their functions, status and values. Elias (2013a) charted such processes of brutalisation among officers in the Wilhelmine army after the First World War when the Allies forced reduction of the size of the German army provided a catalyst to joining what he called ‘conspiratorial secret associations of a terrorist character’ (Elias 2013a: 208). This process model can also be applied to the brutalisation of two key component groups of ISIS—former members of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party and Western ‘socialised’ jihadists. At the heart of brutalisation processes, for Elias, is the breakdown of stable self-discipline of individuals, which is emblematic of a breakdown in civilisation more generally (2013a: 186–222). This process model is clear from Elias’s exposition of brutalisation processes in 1920s’ Germany, in which he connects the shaming and defunctionalisation of German officers following Germany’s loss in the First World War to their brutalisation (2013a: 198). The loss by Germany during the First World War was experienced as a ‘traumatic shock’ by the aristocratic elites and middle classes, which was made worse by an evening-up of the power differences between these groups and former outsiders: [T]he rise of outsider groups that used to be lower in social standing— a former master saddler was the successor to the Kaiser—was felt by many members of the German “good society” to be an unbearable wound to their feelings of self-esteem. (Elias 2013a: 198–199) This shift in power relations at the expense of the once powerful ruling group and the associated feelings of shame and loss of function and status  See Fletcher (1997: 83) for an exposition of decivilising processes.

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are often a central theme in brutalisation processes more generally. Many German officers failed to find civilian work that suited their status aims (Elias 2013a: 207) and so joined the Freikorps (volunteer militia groups). They considered the Weimar government to be immoral and corrupt and wished for it to be destroyed. Many members of the Freikorps travelled to the Baltic to fight the Bolsheviks as this was felt to be more befitting of their status aims. While there, they ‘took part in an orgy of annihilation and destruction’ (Elias 2013a: 214). On returning to Germany, following defeat in the Baltic, many former members of the Freikorps formed conspiratorial terrorist groups, such as ‘Consul’, and murdered ‘undesirable’ politicians. Central to the feelings of those who became terrorists, for Elias, was that they felt like ‘detached-outsiders’ and that society was ‘rotten to the core’. Elias adds that the Baltic ­campaign promised its participants positions befitting of their rank and that this represented a ‘beautiful dream’ for them.

8.8 The Process of Brutalisation in Iraq This process model of brutalisation can be applied to ISIS. In terms of former members of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party (many of whom joined ISIS), parallels can be drawn between the defunctionalisation of officers of the Wilhelmine army and the ‘de-­Ba’athification’ process in Iraq following the 2003 US-led invasion. The de-Ba’athification of Iraq also coincided with a significant shift in the balance of power between Sunnis and Shi’as in favour of the latter. Roy (2017: 79) suggests, this support for the Shi’a in Iraq was part of a process in which Sunni Arab dominance in the Middle East has been overhauled over the past century. The dissolution of the Iraqi army by the US-led occupation, says Roy: [P]ut out of work thousands of officers who had no trouble trading the Ba’athist beret for the Salafi skullcap, continuing the wave of Islamization that had swept the Middle East during the last quarter of the twentieth century. (Roy 2017: 79)

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Roy suggests there was a merger between these former Ba’athists and jihadis returning from Afghanistan, local clerics and tribal leaders. But this brutalisation of former Ba’athists has to be understood in the context of the brutality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. These people were in effect already brutalised and subject to very high levels of external constraint in an authoritarian regime. For example, Sassoon (2011: 141–142) points out that officers in the Iraqi army were executed and tortured if they were believed to be conspiring against the regime or if they failed in battle. More broadly, fear was central to controlling the Iraqi population, with the use of televised trials, confessions and death verdicts to install fear of the regime, as well as imprisonment, torture and execution being used randomly to ensure obedience (Sassoon 2011: 196–199). To compound this brutalisation is Iraq’s recent history of violence, which is dominated by war, including the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the 1990–1991 Gulf War and economic sanctions12 leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Following the 2003 invasion and subsequent insurgency, according to Gerges (2016: 152), many former Ba’athists and Iraqi army officers as well as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-­Baghdadi met in the US-run prison at Camp Bucca, nicknamed the ‘Al-Qaeda School’ by former inmates. Like those former officers of the Wilhelmine army who joined Freikorps and later secret terrorist organisations, many former Ba‘athists joined ISIS. According to Gerges (2016: 149), approximately 30 per cent of senior figures in ISIS’s military command are former army and police officers from the disbanded Iraqi security forces. Like the former officers in the Wilhelmine army, a central facet of the brutalisation of former Ba’athists has been their loss of status. This loss following the 2003 US-invasion, the disbanding of the Iraq’ security services, de-Ba’athification and growth in status of Iraqi Shias would have constituted a ‘reality shock’ to their we-image. They were effectively defunctionalised. The loss of status was also felt by Sunnis relative to the ascendent Shi’a in Iraq. Rather than simply being resigned to their fate of lower social status, the former Ba’athists have sought to

 A report by UNICEF in 2003 points out that per capita income in Iraq dropped from USD 3510 in 1989 to USD 450 in 1996. 12

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regain that lost status and, in some cases, as has been discussed, have joined and become high-ranking members of ISIS as part of a life-ordeath struggle in Iraq and Syria for control of the instruments of violence. The process of brutalisation among former Ba’athists seems likely to have contributed to the ‘orgy of violence’ that has engulfed Iraq and Syria over the past 15 years.

8.9 The Process of Brutalisation in the West But ISIS is also made up of groups and individuals from other parts of the world, including the West, which has not suffered the kinds of brutalisation that Iraq has over recent decades. Accordingly, how can we account for the brutalisation of Western jihadists? Some of the most prominent and horrific acts by ISIS have been committed by Western jihadists, most notably Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John), who is said to have been a member of a gang of British jihadists nicknamed ‘The Beatles’, partially because they are British but also because of the ‘beatings’ they gave to hostages (see Verkaik 2016: 163). Emwazi was the executioner at the centre of a number of ISIS beheading propaganda videos. It is believed that he killed seven hostages from the United Kingdom (David Haines, Allan Henning), the United States (James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig) and Japan (Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto) and was present (see Verkaik 2016: 188) in a film, burning alive a caged Jordanian pilot (Muath al-Kasaesbeh). He is also said to have been involved in the beheadings, murder and torture of many other ISIS captives. According to Verkaik (2016: 162), who recounts some of the testimony of released Western hostages, the Beatles,13 but especially Emwazi, were said to derive pleasure from the torture of prisoners, as can be seen in the quote near the beginning of this chapter. These Western jihadists have not been subject to the brutalities of an authoritarian regime, nor have they been subject to high levels of both

 The names of the other alleged members of the Beatles are Aine Davis, Alexander Kotey and El Shafee Elsheik. 13

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inter- and intra-state violence, nor been occupied by a foreign power, nor been part of a bloody sectarian civil war. Their backgrounds appear to be a world away from those of the former Ba’athists. Verkaik cites a BBC interview with another of the Beatles hostages, Nicolas Hénin, who got away, which provides some insight into some of these differences: I noticed that these jihadists have little to do with the local culture— Arab or Muslim culture—they are children of our societies. They speak our language, they have the same cultural references we do. They watch the same movies as us, play the same video games our children play. They are products of our culture, our world… [T]hese are fragile people. As soon as they arrive, [their recruiters] hook them and push them to commit a crime, and then there is no way they can turn back…I remember with a couple of [the captors], we had discussions that showed their convictions were a bit fragile and that they maybe even had regrets about what they were doing. Beyond that, connection was very difficult. A bit of chat might help, but no pity for sure because they are totally closed to pity. [Asking for pity] is the worst thing you can do. It's stupid. Never try it. (Verkaik 2016: 173) The quotation from Hénin is revealing in a number of ways. It suggests that these jihadists were Westerners, more specifically British. It also shows that as part of the process of brutalisation these British jihadists were under some form of external constraint to commit violence. At the same time, their lack of ‘pity’ is an evidence of a reduced scope for mutual identification. Being in and among other members of ISIS, including those led by the former (already highly brutalised) Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria—parts of the world that are at war and have been subject to extreme levels of violence in recent years—is clearly a significant part of the brutalisation process for individuals like Emwazi and the other ‘Beatles’. They have entered into a theatre in which extreme violence confers status on those who practise it. As relative outsiders to the Iraqis and other hardened jihadists, it is likely to have made it even more imperative that Western jihadists commit extreme violence in order to ‘fit in’ and improve their standing among their new peers. But the process of brutalisation of Western jihadists does not begin in Iraq and Syria. They have to make a

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decision to travel to join ISIS, which itself comes about as part of a brutalisation process. Accordingly, Verkaik (2016: 4) says Emwazi moved to the United Kingdom from Kuwait with his family when he was six years old and that his family was a member of the persecuted Bedoon minority—an outsider group in Kuwait and Iraq. Verkaik makes the astute observation that ‘a sense of alienation and resentment may have become deeply rooted in the Emwazi family psyche’. Emwazi and his family began life in the United Kingdom as outsiders. To add to this, being an immigrant and Muslim in the United Kingdom compounds this outsider status, as do problems associated with prejudice and racism towards outsiders and ‘other’ ethnic groups. One of the problems associated with this outsider status is fewer power chances, and having access to a meaningful and status-enhancing life is therefore blocked on most fronts (see Elias 2013a: 347; Elias and Scotson 2008) on the blocking of meaning and status chances). Verkaik (2016: 13) suggests that as a teenager Emwazi was interested in drinking, smoking cannabis, dressing like a gangster rapper and often got into fights. Emwazi was gradually drawn into a network of Islamists and jihadis in West London who lived near him or attended the same university. The group he was drawn into had fought ‘jihad’ in Somalia and was well known to security services. Verkaik (2016: 34) claims that Emwazi looked up to the leading members of this group. As he was drawn further into the West London jihadist network, Emwazi became more devout and also blamed the West for the deaths of millions of Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere. Verkaik (2016: 49) suggests that the network Emwazi belonged to had a reach through West London and into suburban areas such as Hounslow and Southall. Many of this group, says Verkaik, either had been or were involved in robbery, drug dealing and violence in the United Kingdom, so they become outsiders in other ways too. These ‘gangs’ and Salafi-jihadism more generally relate to Vertigans (2011: 54) idea of the role played by a ‘broader communal habitus’, which can contribute to individuals being drawn into networks that are brutalising. That is, Salafi-jihadists, for example, are able to draw upon historical memories and a commonality of feeling that helps to bond them together, but at the same time regards the West as an enemy. They can develop an ‘international habitus’ (See Vertigans 2011: 63) in the form of Salafi-­

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jihadism. At the same time, they witness Western violence against Muslims across the world (e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan), which helps to provide a degree of legitimation for violence more generally—to some extent they imitate the West. The process of brutalisation in the United Kingdom, for many jihadists, therefore, begins very early on and is closely linked to their status as ‘detached-outsiders’.14 This detached-outsider status (Elias 2013a: 209; Dunning 2016: 46) is a consequence of their being immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants in a country in which they have had fewer chances to develop the kinds of networks that longevity in a community (see Elias and Scotson 2008) allow for, and which can contribute to an increase in power chances and status. This outsider status is compounded by the stigmatisation of Muslims (see Sutton and Vertigans 2005: 151) in the United Kingdom and elsewhere more generally. At the same time, and relatedly, these groups tend to be poorer in economic terms, which further cements their status as outsiders. The process of becoming Salafi-jihadists (a further brutalisation) happens in the context of a detachment from the rest of society. These groups, who are already towards the margins of society and indulge in petty crime, gang violence and drug dealing, develop a strong we-image and a sense of cohesion in the form of Salafi-jihadism. This sense of collective charisma, says Vertigans (2011), further cements their bonds as does their stigmatisation. According to Atran (2010: 303), the tightening of bonds between such we-groups encourages what he calls ‘parochial altruism’ between members and towards ‘imagined kin’, including the Ummah and fellow Salafi-jihadists. Close-knit ‘bands of brothers’ (Atran 2010: 328) form between Salafi-jihadists’ immediate groups, and this helps to develop a ‘deep love’ of their we-group for which they are willing to fight and die. Atran suggests that humans evolved to support each other in small groups, but that this trait can be tricked into support for other ‘imagined kin’.  ‘Detached-outsiders’ for Elias (2013a: 209) referred to how the Freikorps felt about Weimar Germany: that was ‘rotten to the core’ and was about to ‘go under’. As a group they felt ‘detached’ from a society that bore no similarity to their own ideals. The same can be said for Salafi-jihadists in the West. 14

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A similar process of brutalisation can be observed among other Western Salafi-jihadists. According to an article in the New York Times in March 2016 all of the then named perpetrators of the attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, in which 137 people (including the attackers) were killed and another 413 injured, had criminal pasts. Several of the attackers had links to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, which according to a BBC report from November 2015 has the highest concentration of foreign ISIS fighters from Europe. In an April 2016 report for the Canadian magazine, Maclean’s, a resident of Molenbeek is quoted as saying ‘There is a gap between our community and the rest of European Belgians. We might be born here and grow up here but we are apart’. Again this suggests a marginalised outsider status. None of this is to claim that drinking, taking drugs and being involved in petty crime and violence lead to Salafi-jihadist violence. Nor does it suggest that all Western Salafi-jihadists undergo a process of brutalisation in this way. What it does suggest is that significant numbers of those who become Salafi-jihadists were outsiders from the beginning, which has made them vulnerable to further marginalisation and brutalisation. The process of brutalisation that these young men go through in the West is accompanied by an increasing hostility towards the West, including what they regard as Western decadence. This hostility is ingrained in Salafi-jihadism more generally and in the pronouncements and deeds of ISIS. It is important to note as well that Western Salafi-jihadists in almost all cases shift from a relatively informalised way of being that encompasses what is often referred to as Western cultural norms, and youth culture, to much more formalised ways of being as the process of developing their Salafi-jihadist identities takes hold. In effect, their process of brutalisation is accompanied by a process of formalisation, in which activities such as drinking alcohol, smoking and drug taking become taboo. They tend to adhere to a much stricter regime of self-restraints, associated with their dress, denying themselves alcohol and drugs, and taking a much more puritanical approach to the opposite sex on the one hand, but also a debasement and dehumanising of women who do not adhere to their standards on the other. Their marginalisation from ‘mainstream’ society in the West is in effect defunctionalising. They are unable to develop meaningful social status

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beyond their immediate social groups and have status-enhancing opportunities in the West blocked to a large extent. This is based on their outsider status as Muslim immigrants, associated problems of prejudice and stigmatisation, and being young. Another key point is the related histories that some Salafi-jihadists and potential recruits can have to parts of the world in which internal pacification processes both historically and in the present day have been limited, and so this too can contribute to their brutalisation (see Vertigans 2011: 48–58). Their positions in the West, however, are also related to the evening-up of power chances between the former colonial powers and the former colonies, and related processes of global integration and integration conflicts. That they have a group—Salafi-jihadists—which includes membership in a diverse number of countries that can provide status and meaning in this context, and which is seeking recruits, is central to how the problem of brutalisation becomes a global one. In effect, this becomes a loosely connected global we-group.

8.10 Conclusion It appears to be the case that Salafi-jihadism is one of many offshoots of a long-term process of global integration and reduction in power differentials between all of humanity. But it should be understood that a reduction in power differentials across humanity does not mean that there are not still huge power and status differences between groups. The process, rather, involves greater integration in terms of a range of differing established-­outsider groups. As discussed, there has been an evening-up of power potential between former colonisers and former colonised. Equalising processes are also apparent in many parts of the world between men and women, adults and children, and people of different ethnicities and sexual orientations. This evening-up of power chances of these latter groups is particularly apparent in the West. But the West’s continued global dominance in a variety of areas means that as all groups become more closely integrated, it is Western informalised behavioural standards that outsider groups are increasingly having to adapt to.

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As global processes of integration advance, many groups can lose functions, meaning and status, or are deprived of the status that corresponds to their status aims. This can be partially brutalising, while at the same time it contributes to the development of new established-outsider relations or to the maintenance of present ones. Such relations can easily spiral towards conflict and further brutalisation, as appears to have been central to the former Ba’ath Party members of ISIS and Western socialised Salafi-jihadists: they became increasingly brutalised. In both of these cases the brutalised have either lost status and meaning or been deprived of status and meaning, and so have railed against what they see as the group, and the way of being, that threatens them—the West, Western behavioural standards and for them Western immorality. The loss and emasculation of function, status and meaning, as part of global integration processes, therefore, are central to the development of Salafi-jihadism in both the Middle East and the West. As Elias states: If a society denies members of the rising generations a creative meaningfulness, then, in the end, they will find their fulfilment in destruction. He who destroys is all-powerful… In the end, the destroyer triumphs—Lucifer on the ruins of the world. (Elias 2013a: 489)

9 Informalisation and Sport: The Case of Jogging/Running in the USA (1960–2000) Raúl Sánchez García

9.1 Introduction This chapter deals with the application of informalisation theory to sports. More specifically, it explores the informalising and reformalising phases occurring in the development of jogging/running in the USA (1960–2000). A spiralling fashion of informalising and reformalising trends was observed in the changes of jogging/running during three different periods: First period (informalisation), during the 1960s and 1970s, constituting the first jogging explosion; Second period (early reformalisation), during the 1980s; and Third period (consolidated reformalisation), during the 1990s, constituting the second explosion of running. The theory of informalisation has been fruitfully developed over the last 40 years by Cas Wouters (1976, 1986, 1999a, 2004, 2007,

Thanks to Cas Wouters and Michael Dunning for their insightful comments and proofreading of previous drafts of this chapter.

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_9

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2014a, b).1 For Wouters, the more flexible application of rules and manners during the 1960s and 1970s was not to be interpreted as symptoms of a decivilising trend—even though they caused some ‘moral panics’—instead, they represented a complex form of civilising process as a wider variety of manners were expressed in more moderate, flexible and controlled forms. Wouters considered that Elias’s analysis of the civilising process had only identified the formalising tendency that was predominant between the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. According to Wouters (2007), at the turn of the twentieth century, the pattern changed to an informalising tendency of the civilising process, which gained predominance from then on.2 Nonetheless, predominance does not entail exclusivity; as Elias warned about the shifting balance between civilising and decivilising trends in every epoch, Wouters also stressed the importance of understanding the balance between formalising and informalising trends (Sánchez García 2017). To substantiate his analysis, Wouters carried out a comparative study of the USA, England, Germany and the Netherlands, linking changes in manners (psychogenesis) and broader social patterns (sociogenesis). Although some peculiarities emerged in the different national processes,3 the overall social pattern in the four cases since  Elias’s and Wouters’s mutual influence was paramount in the development of the concept of informalisation, even though there are some important nuances between each other’s understanding of the matter (see Wouters 2007, Appendix 2 for Elias/Wouters’ mutual influence in the iteration of informalisation theory; see also Chapter 1, Sect. 1.4 of this book). 2  Whereas Elias’s theory extensively develops the first term of the expression ‘diminishing contrast, increasing varieties’ (Elias 2012a [1939]), focusing on the formalising trends, Wouters (1976) stresses the second term (increasing varieties) and was able to identify informalising trends. 3  In the case of USA, the degree of social mixing was larger than in Europe as ‘the circles constituting a good society have remained less united, their ranks far less efficiently closed’ (Wouters 2007: 58). The ideal we-image of individual freedom in a classless society must be related to this particular pattern of social development in which open competition and related status-striving became a defining feature of the American habitus (Wouters 2007: 161). See Mennell (2007) for an extended analysis of the American civilising process. 1

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the end of the nineteenth century presented an expanding social integration and identification pattern among different social groups in terms of class, gender, ethnicity or ­generations. The general trend of informalisation unfolded in a spiralling fashion with informalising and reformalising phases. During the latter, many earlier informalised social codes were integrated and became formalised. The main waves or spurts of informalisation occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century, the roaring twenties and the permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s. As bonds of cooperation and competition between people from different social groups increased and hierarchical differences between them diminished along different informalising phases, ‘more people pressured each other to take more of each other into account more often’ (Wouters 2001: 58). As social integration increased, the pressure to curb expressions of superiority increased too (Wouters 2001: 56). This behaviour exemplified internalised social avoidance: from avoiding lower-­ class people to avoiding superiority feelings (Wouters 2007: 53). Within this social pattern, a rising social constraint to be unconstrained and to use more flexible social relations was set in motion. It implied a more conscious decision to change the social code depending on the situation. Thus, the broader process of increasing social integration and identification was mirrored at the level of personality with a more integrated pattern of psychical layers. Wouters (2007: 212) coined the term third nature to denote a greater permeation of affects by the intellect and a tendency towards speaking more openly about affections and emotional life. The idea of third nature contrasted with the Eliasian concept of habitus as second nature, which implied a self-regulated conscience functioning automatically. According to Wouters (2004: 208), the advance was from conscience (more superego directed and predominant during the formalising trend) to consciousness (more ego directed and predominant during the informalising trend). Thus, informalisation implied not only a standard of emotional management that demanded a more even, stable, all-­round control (the typical definition of a more civilised habitus) but also a qualitative difference. It presented a more open discussion and negotiation of formerly tabooed emotional matters and a direct experimentation of the latter within activities such as

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leisure, which allowed for a controlled decontrolling of emotional controls (Wouters 2007: 212). From this point of view, the application of Elias and Dunning’s (2008) ‘quest for excitement’ theory to the second half of the twentieth century could be interpreted as a partial specification of the informalisation theory in the ambit of the leisure/ sports activities.4 In fact, Wouters’s informalisation theory can be applied to the historical development of the modern sport on a longer range.5 Identifiable informalising phases were to be found in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during the 1920s and the 1960s–1970s. Until recently, few analyses have applied informalisation theory to the development of modern sport. For instance, Sánchez García and Malcolm (2010) conceived the development of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as an overall informalising trend in the sportisation process of combat sports, spiralling through informalising-reformalising short-term phases (Sánchez García 2018a). The present chapter aims to expand the application of informalisation theory to sports. The case study is the development of jogging/ running in the USA during the second half of the twentieth century. The main objective is to match changes in broad social dynamics and changes in the values attached to jogging/running. The empirical data used to observe changes in the values of these activities comes from the most relevant books on jogging/running during each period and from

 Nonetheless, there are important differences between Elias and Dunning’s and Wouters’s interpretations of the ‘quest for excitement’ theory. Elias and Dunning’s approach considered leisure and sport as a kind of compensatory mechanism for unexciting, humdrum societies with a relatively high degree of civilisation. By contrast, Wouters considered the development of leisure and sport not as a compensatory mechanism but just as another symptom of a general informalising trend. In fact, Wouters took ‘Elias’s expression “the controlled de-controlling of restraints on emotions” from its more limited context of leisure and used it to indicate the overall direction of social and psychic processes in the twentieth century’ (2007: 240). 5  Different informalisation phases were also identified in the development of other physical cultures such as Japanese Martial Arts (Sánchez García 2018b). 4

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the most influential magazine throughout the years: Runner’s World. The publication, originally appeared in 1966 as Distance Running News, became Runner’s World in 1970, and, due to its competitive capacity—75,000 copies in 1977 and 400,000  in 1979, according to Anderson (1983: xi)—it absorbed other publications such as The Runner in 1986 and remained as the most influential publication for US runners.

9.2 T  he Informalising Phase of Jogging/ Running in the USA During the 1960s and 1970s During the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, greater social integration and a wider and more flexible use of manners spread in the USA. Gender and ethnic levelling and the expression of anti-superiorist feelings came to the fore through social activism, as represented in second-wave feminism or the Civil Rights Movement. Romantic description of outsider social groups (from psychiatric patients to hoboes, beatniks and other social rebels) increased as ‘the protective function of keeping a distance or reserve came to be suspected’ (Wouters 2007: 189). The baby-boom generation experimented with a countercultural revolution, best embodied in a middle-class young who tried to reject virtually all the traditional values, tried to ‘drop out’ from the system and generated new ways of life: a set of beliefs that crystallised in the hippie movement. This countercultural mood was also clearly present in different manifestations such as sports. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the emergence of a new kind of sport: alternative sports (Rinehart 2000); whiz sports (Midol 1993); or, as Wheaton (2004) recently proposed, lifestyle sports. The countercultural values associated with these practices were highly influenced by the so-called Californian Sports (Pociello 1979, 1995; Loret 1995), pointing to the fact that the USA was a hub for this kind of alternative way to understand sports. After the ‘hypertechnologised severe era’ that led to the Second World War, the 1960s’ youth promoted the hippie’s sexual revolution, psychedelic experimen-

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tation, an anti-authoritarian and communal stance, a romantic back to nature and a taste for simplicity, best exemplified by Asian belief systems such as Zen Buddhism. Within the realm of physical culture, a fun and self-discovery approach unfolded. It promoted a return to games connected to nature, instead of the seriousness of the competitive sports business connected to industrialisation. This novel approach found expression in activities such as surfing, skateboarding, rock climbing and BMX.  These kinds of activities clearly ­epitomised an informalising turn in the world of sports.6 The anti-rules and anti-competition features of these activities clearly related to a plain rejection of the winners’ and losers’ mentality (intimately attached to superiority feelings), a defining feature of informalising phases (Wouters 2007: 53). The competition turned against oneself as a way of self-exploration and self-enhancement, not for the sake of defeating others. This chapter argues that such values were also to become progressively predominant in the jogging/running revolution that swept the USA in the 1960s and 1970s.7 Nonetheless, the predominance of an informalising trend during these decades was also counterbalanced—especially during the 1960s—by formalising trends, connecting jogging to health practices and individual responsibility. In order to present the contrast between both trends, this section analyses the discourses of the most influential books of the era.

 Following Dunning and Sheard’s (2005) analysis, a progressive transformation from folk games into modern sports characterised the general sportisation pattern. Thus, it may seem that the return through countercultural practices to a notion of games that anteceded institutionalised sports could imply a de-sportising, decivilising pattern. This chapter claims that such transformation only apparently represented a decivilising, de-sportising pattern. In reality, it exemplified a higher degree of civilisation through an informalising pattern in which a more flexible and open experimentation demanded a higher and more conscious emotional management from the participants. 7  Jogging/running peaked around the 1970s with an estimation around 25 million runners (Fixx 1977). According to a national poll in 1979, 30 million of Americans embraced the activity (Henderson 1983: 347). 6

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a) The Formalising Trend In the 1960s, concerns over cardiovascular disease in a sedentary and opulent society provided a receptive environment for new solutions; for example, in the Air Force, physician Kenneth Cooper decided to develop a new programme based on proper exercise and healthy food. His book Aerobics, published in 1968, had a huge impact in the new fitness movement. Besides, in the 1960s, US sportsmen began to win middle- and long-distance competitions. Legendary Marathon figures, such as Amby Burfoot, Frank Shorter, Kenny Moore or Bill Rodgers, popularised the activity at the highest levels. An old generation of classic trainers from the pre-war era such as Arthur Lydiard or Bill Bowerman wrote influential works, featuring values associated with a pre-war ethos such as hard work, effort and ‘heroicity.’ These authors clearly related the concept of jogging to health: (1) [J]ogging means a steady or an easy-paced run alternating with breath catching periods of walking; (2) it means a kind of running, generally a slow regular trot that has been described as the next step up from walking; and (3) it is a word that describes the entire program of physical fitness outlined in this book. (Bowerman and Harris 1967: 8) Jogging was part of fitness in relation to health, especially oriented to those in middle age in a society concerned with ageing. However, jogging was also connected to values beyond pure medical effects; Bowerman pointed out how it helped to give a better aspect, to lose weight or shrink the waist, and to boost self-confidence and sexual capacity. Furthermore, the complex physical exercise-aesthetics-health presented a moral undertone; being out of shape represented a symptom of moral and social irresponsibility. As the authors stated: ‘The happy fat person is a myth. Normally he’s miserable, ashamed of his appearance’ (Bowerman and Harris 1967: 21).

b) The Informalising Trend The introduction of other kind of values was due to the influence of a second generation, formed by middle-age men (around 30–40) during

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the 1970s. They infused the activity with a counterculture mood, based on anti-authoritarianism, fun and a return to more ‘natural ways.’ The influence of the old generation on health matters was absorbed in the 1970s through the anti-medical stance of self-help and holistic programmes, and claims of personal responsibility. As Gillick (1984) comments, the social factors determining the emergence of jogging in this decade were related to the recognition that medicine could not prevent or avoid death and to the discourse around collective immorality and social disintegration, centred in the protest against Vietnam and pro Human Rights. This anti-medical movement expressed a typical pattern of informalising phases: the identification with outsiders, not the established (Wouters 2007: 188), the latter connected to the medical institution. During this phase, the term jogging started to coexist with the term running. The runner expressed an integral position, a lifestyle, beyond the narrow instrumental relation between running and health. Running came to be defined from the personal; one could consider himself a valid, competitive runner without the need to be included in the elite of the sport. The attitude to the body emphasised the so-called inner part, not the outer image bound to mere aesthetics. The group of influential authors exemplifying the informalising trend included George Sheehan (in his 40s, constituting a bridge between the older and younger generations), Mike Spino (in his 20s) and James Fixx (in his 30s). Their books became key influences for the definition of the running movement in the USA. George Sheehan, cardiologist and editor of Runner’s World magazine until his death in 1993, was considered as one of the intellectual fathers of the movement. His book Running and Being (1978) defended a simple anti-materialistic life, arguing against excessive rational control, featuring an anti-authoritarian mood. For Sheehan, running was the solution to ‘sedentarism’ and medical institutionalisation. Mike Spino, a younger author who experimented with different kinds of techniques (mixing meditation, yoga, jogging…),8 advocated for a

 Spino developed specific training programmes at the Esalen Institute in California, a hub for alternative therapies and techniques connected to the countercultural values of the era. 8

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kind of jogging that had nothing to do with traditional conceptions of a sport. His core ideas were expressed in his book Beyond Jogging: ‘Jogging is not enough. In a society in the search of new paradigms in several aspects of life, the objective of the athlete has to be the offer of a new way of creativity and comprehension through sport’ (Spino 1976: 42). For Spino, jogging was a means to achieve inner growth: ‘With its diverse paces, rhythms and breath pauses and united to the disciplines directed to obtain a greater degree of conscience, the run can be a means to find wider dimensions of our self ’ (1976: 79). Physical activities needed to regain the connection with natural environments and collective practice (e.g. the family), and they were to oppose the artificial and mechanical exercise of the gym: ‘Most of the saunas and gyms don’t allow men, women and children to do exercise together (…) one of my tasks as adviser in fitness programs is to elaborate programs for the whole family’ (Spino 1976: 89). This section ends up with the presentation of the book that epitomised the turning point for the running explosion: James F. Fixx’s (1977) The Complete Book of Running. The self-help and holistic conceptions of health characteristics of the 1970s, and claims for personal responsibility, appear in the book from the start: ‘If our doctors can’t be expected to bring us good health, to whom can we look? The answer is plain: to ourselves’ (Fixx 1977: 5). Besides, an anti-competitive tone (a rejection of superiority feelings) and the shift towards self-improvement (competing against oneself ) are also present: For many of us a race is a special treat, a chance to compete primarily against ourselves and too see how much faster we can go than we have before (…) That’s why there’s such camaraderie at races. Other races aren’t your chief competitors; you are. (Fixx 1977: 178) The rejection of superiority feelings was also present in the way the author considered the activity: ‘Running is also probably the most democratic. Runners are almost totally lacking in race, sex, age or class discrimination’ (Fixx 1977: 38). Finally, Fixx also expressed an ecological crave for a return to a mystified non-urban past:

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As Runners I think we reach directly back along the endless chains of history. We experience what we would have had we lived ten thousand years ago, eating fruits, nuts and vegetables and keeping our hearts and lungs and muscles fit by constant movement. (Fixx 1977: 249)

9.3 E  arly Reformalisation Phase of Jogging/ Running During the 1980s Around the 1980s, the return of conservatism and traditional liberalism during Reagan’s administration encompassed fiscal austerity, the free market and a lack of government intervention. Family values based on morality, property and decency were cherished. The younger generations developed a kind of consumer culture based on the conspicuous display of the personal image: the narcissistic cult of the body as an object of desire that had to be disciplined through dieting and exercising, expressing a symbol of youth, vitality, energy and mobility. The yuppie epitomised the image of success at a time when the collective emancipation of the previous phase disappeared and the only viable way of liberation depended on personal freedom. As Wouters remarked, in this social context: [D]ominant regimes of manners and emotions tended towards greater strictness, hierarchy and consensus. There was renewed respect for discipline, for law and order, and the sexual revolution was pronounced over and done with. (2007: 176) Physical activities went through a process of reformalisation and became explicit ways to present a desirable and potent body image. Featherstone (1987) proposed that such processes were especially acute among the middle classes, who practised jogging, aerobic or Californian outdoor activities as a way to cope with their occupational concern with self-­ presentation (p. 126). According to Ingham (1985), a heightened perception and attention to the body thrived, thanks to a political strategy that avoided any implication of state intervention and favoured personal

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responsibility over health, associated with personal lifestyle choices. The care of the body became a moral disposition. Bad habits were responsible for cancer, AIDS or heart attacks. Being ill, ageing, presenting a lack of fitness or being overweight became markers of moral degeneration of those who were not able to take responsibility for themselves nor were able to produce any benefit for the rest of the society. The ‘out of shape’ and the unemployed were the paradigmatic enemy. By contrast, the fit individual represented self-sufficiency and self-autonomy, and was associated with success and self-esteem. This heightened sense of the care of the self perfectly matched a private consumer culture that allowed individual choices for a healthy lifestyle, the landmark of a happy life. During this neoliberal phase of individualised responsibility within the tense environment of the Cold War, the muscular hero—epitomised by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger—came back to the scene. Rocky, Rambo, The Terminator, Conan or Commando presented a kind of c­ onspicuous on-screen muscularity (Dutton 1995). The main characters in those films were individuals who, in the face of an unjust situation, decided to find a solution on their own, a solution that, most of the time, went through extreme violence but was always justified by prior actions. Moreover, films such as Schwarzenegger’s Pumping Iron not only reinforced the presence of bodybuilding but also permeated the social conscience towards this kind of desirable muscular body. Women’s ideal of a toned and hard body had the equivalence in Jane Fonda’s workout videos (Radner 1995): fitness directly related to gym activities. As Kirk and Colquhoun (1989) expressed, the term fitness contained at the same time notions of health and aesthetic appearance; the important thing was not only to be healthy but also to appear healthy, because the healthy body was attractive. As an article from USA Today expressed: We think that to have an adequate body means we have our lives under control. The Nautilus [a fitness machine] body, non-fat, nonsmoker, has become a status symbol. To have one of these is as good as having a BMW. (September 14, 1988: 2, in Howell 1991: 263. Square brackets are mine)

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Yuppie fitness embodied the ideals of the new conservatism: a hard work ethic for personal success and a definition of quality of life associated with market consumption and status. Jogging/running became a tool, a way towards fitness, not a way of self-knowledge and perfection. The activity helped to maintain self-discipline and health and to improve the body presence. The transition from the values of the previous phase to the new one had a clear example in the case of Jerry Rubin, President of Network America. His main task was to arrange night outs for New York executives. This new 1980s’ version of Rubin was so different from the Rubin of the 1960s who had joined Abbie Hoffman to form the yippies (Youth International Party) and led some anti-war rallies. As Rubin commented in an interview appearing in the Close-up section of Runner’s World in April 1989 (pp. 32–34), his radical positions about changing the society veered towards a personal revolution about changing oneself as a matter of a healthy, individual act of responsibility: I got disillusioned with politics because of the infighting in the movement. When I realised there wasn’t going to be a revolution and that I was going to be around for a long time, I thought I better start to care for myself. In the 60s I felt I could change the world: I never realised you could also do something about your body (…) Running is an end in itself, and I enjoy it. To me, the greater contradiction is people who want to change society, but are fat and smoke cigarettes. This I don’t understand. How can you want to change society when your own life is out of balance. (p. 34) A change of values from the previous era also emerged in the advertising campaigns displayed in Runner’s World magazine during the 1980s. Products ranged from Visa and Gold American Express credit card to Dodge Daytona, exclusive Vuarnet (French) sunglasses and Moët & Chandon champagne, and elegant suits from a brand called Gladiator, whose motto is ‘For men who play to win.’ They all displayed the predominant values of the decade: competitiveness, hard work, personal responsibility (about the job and personal care), quickness, hardness and

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conspicuous luxurious consumption.9 Running equipment also featured in those values. An advert for Asics running shoes said: The GT III. Not for the masses. Some manufacturers promise a running shoe revolution, but end up catering to a herd of conformists. Asics’s new GT III is for the runner on the road less traveled: the path of the leader. (Runner’s World, June 1988: 13) The campaign launched by Nike in 1987–1988, based upon the slogan A Revolution in Motion, mixed religious calls with the freedom of being different, articulating both with the message of personal effort. For instance, a Nike advertisement appearing in Runner’s World (August 1990: 52–53) presented a female runner passing by a lonely church placed in a field. The message mixed personal responsibility and the religious calling of running. The text said: ‘Ten Million decibels loud. And it doesn’t care you are tired. Or it’s your birthday. Or some holiday honouring a saint. So, thought you’d rather not, you start down the road again. The road when it calls, it screams. Just do it.’ Moreover, a paradigmatic example of the conservative values of the New Right appeared in a specific advertisement of Nike within the pages of Runner’s World issues during 1988. It portrayed a cartoon of Ronald Reagan in a military salute, motivating the national conscience of the runners. The ad headline said: ‘He can’t run in ’88. But you can,’ and then the text continues: ‘The constitution prevents the President from running again. But nothing’s keeping you from running. Because this year, there are more road races to choose from than ever before’ (Runner’s World, February 1988: 71). Nonetheless, the design of running shoes did not exclusively reject the values from the previous era. The 1980s exemplified the reformalisation of

 Only those ‘undesirable vices’ of yuppie culture (e.g. drugs such as cocaine) should be kept at bay: in the 1988 May issue (p. 81) of Runner’s World, an ad from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America portrayed a man sniffing cocaine with the headline: ‘How do you expect your kid to keep his nose clean if you don’t?’ The text continues: ‘They are the worst kind of hypocrite. Parents who warn their children about using drugs while they themselves are abusing drugs.’ 9

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the previous informalising trend. It blended some values from the previous era such as flexibility and freedom with notions of stability, control and comfort. For instance, an advert for Turntec running shoes advertised a new anatomical cradle system for heel stability with the following ­message: ‘Runners are not squares. The way most companies design running shoes, you’d think runners had square feet. If that were true, they could run in shoeboxes. But the fact is that runners are not squares’ (Runner’s World, August 1987: 5). A Converse advert for running shoes featuring a curved design for the sole stated: ‘Our new A B series doesn’t break all the rules. It just bends them a little’ (Runner’s World, April 1988: 53). These values were not only restricted to men. They also applied to women. An ad of an old lady sitting in a sober room, wearing old ­pilgrims clothing, looking at her pair of blue Nike running shoes displayed the slogan: ‘For women who want to get back on their feet.’ The text followed: If you want to avoid injury, remember this: women don’t pronate like men. Because of their hip structure, they actually pronate more. The Nike Air Control is the first stability shoe designed specifically for the way a woman is built and the way she moves. With an anatomically correct fit. Extra flexibility. And the best cushioning for either sex: Nike-Air. A revolution in motion. (Runner’s World, August 1987: 48–49) This advertisement blended rigidity and control of women’s anatomy but at the same time included terms such as flexibility, cushioning or even revolution.

9.4 T  he Late Reformalisation Phase of Running During the 1990s Whereas in the 1980s the main social reference figure was the yuppie, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of post-industrial new middle classes connected to the meritocratic information society. David Brooks (2000) named them as bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians), who exemplified a blend

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between the 1960s’ spirit and the renewed financial energies of the 1980s. They became the leading group in the synthesis of previous informalisation and formalisation trends. The bobos achieved the paradoxical union of success and a certain unsubmissive spirit. The failure of the movement in the 1970s did not mean a complete abandon of those values. For the bobos, the way to earn and spend money came foremost: money had to come from an expressive task and was not to be used as a means for conspicuous consumption and leisure display. Instead, money should be spent on necessary tools, the intimate and small, the details and the retro-­ chic fashion. Sobriety was paramount, something expressed in every demonstration, even in politics where political correctness and the shift towards the political centre gained momentum. This calculated hedonism found its greatest expression in the bobo lifestyle in which the care of the self, referred not only to health but also to sexual matters, was softly controlled by medical discourse. Productive pleasures were good and counterproductive pleasures were bad. Other common features of bobos were their relation with nature, imagined as an escapist landscape to enjoy ludic, adventure activities ready for intrepid urbanites. The permeation of these ideas materialised in the marketing campaigns in which a more relaxed, youthful and fresh style characterised the mass consumer culture. The hard-body presentation of action heroes in the movies softened: Schwarzenegger acted as a Kindergarten Cop or as a pregnant father in Junior and in Terminator II featured as a good cyborg with feelings. The 1990s witnessed the second explosion of running, especially from the second part of the decade (e.g. 31,000 participants in the 1999 New York Marathon). The culture of running returned to the roots of the movement. The decade witnessed the re-editions of classic books such as Sheehan’s Running and Being, Lydiard and Gilmour’s Running with Lydiard or the recovering of mythical characters such as Bill Bowerman, the image of Nike since 2000 with the motto ‘For Runners by Runners.’ The idea of running as a way of life rose again with a new vitality. One of Nike’s Bowerman Series stated: ‘Running not only transports you, it also transforms you.’ Running decoupled from an external definition of fitness became attached to the inner pole expressed in the term wellness. A return to the subjective, the holistic, the pleasure of daily activities and

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authenticity of the experiences became embedded in an elaborated consumer culture expressed through lifestyle. In an article called ‘10 Commandments of Healthy Running,’ Bob Wischnia emphasised the joyful, the funny, pleasurable feelings of running instead of rigid training programmes: ‘Instead of training or working out, I would play. I had always tried to regard my running as fun (…) I’m not faster or stronger, not settings PRs or achieving breakthroughs. I’m simply happier and healthier’ (Runner’s World, July 1993: 54). Changes in the kind of products advertised in Runner’s World are also telling: the ad of a running shoe worn by a runner surrounded by natural landscapes became iconic.10 Besides, non-running products such as jeeps embedded in natural environments mushroomed in the pages of the magazine; urban sports cars, even though they had not disappeared, registered a change of scenery towards the countryside; the case of Saturn cars is paradigmatic in this sense. The idea of adventure in nature also appeared in some reports on long-distance running. For instance, an article from the 1993 September issue of Runner’s World by Marty Dugard titled ‘This ain’t no triathlon’ described the endurance race in the Gulf of Oman with the sub-heading: ‘You want adventure? You want to test your strength, endurance and self-sufficiency? You want 10 days of near-death experiences in one of the world’s most exotic environments? You got it’ (p. 65). Rodale Press, a publishing company committed to social development and self-growth, displayed two telling advertisements in Runner’s World about the relationship between nature, adventure and ecological conscience. In the first one, a young man riding a horse in a joyful cowboy scene stated: ‘Suddenly I found myself driving cattle 60 miles to fresh grazing land! I instantly felt much better about myself, and began to see what’s important in life’ (Runner’s World, December 1993: 27). In the second one, the ad presented native Indian Americans in full tribal clothing, some of them dancing. In the front, the chief and his wife were looking at the camera. The chief, called Norman Roach, declared: ‘Running  A Diadora running sandal ad expressed perfectly the intimate connection with nature: ‘Ahhh, clear blue skies, the sun beaming down, and the feeling of wind rushing through your toes’ (Runner’s World, April 1994: 57). 10

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is an Indian tradition. The best runners could run down a deer for dinner, and in some tribes were as revered as medicine men’ (Runner’s World, April 1994: 20–21).11 The books of John Bingham (1999, 2002)—dubbed as the ‘new troubadour of the second running explosion’ by Runner’s World—provide a good opportunity to analyse the discourse on running during the late reformalisation of the 1990s. His books present an autobiographic style, referring to personal experiences, sensations and feelings. The books of the ‘penguin’—as he calls himself because of his ‘waddling’ motion—are a mixture of a self-help manual, light philosophy and technical dilettantism, without references to scientific sources. Running appears as ­something valuable in which to find oneself again, something to cling to as a compass of life. Even though Bingham defined the category of runner more openly in comparison to what it was in previous eras,12 the category of athlete as a racer—not a runner—was given a higher consideration. A runner became someone who runs on an informal base, but an athlete took running as a central axis of his life experience: races were a means for meaningful self-knowledge. However, the journey to becoming an athlete did not have to be hard or painful; it unfolded along the pleasure of a calculated hedonism, because as Bingham stated: ‘Training hard wasn’t work, it was fun!’ (1999: 196). Contrary to the traditional ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality, the pain became something helpful to tell you when to stop in order to preserve oneself for enjoying future activities. The ludic and the child-like part of practice gained predominance: ‘The biggest revelation was realising that I can’t live every moment of my life as an adult. It’s not necessarily better to act your age. So I don’t’ (Bingham 1999: 194).  Runner’s World also included an advertisement from the American Indian College Fund (Runner’s World, August 1992: 87), which claimed environmental care and linked the values of the Native American Indians with the strong family values of American society. 12  ‘With this book, anyone can be a runner. You need only have a willingness to forget everything you thought you knew about running and almost everything you thought you knew about yourself. Running isn’t what it was in the 70s. Chances are that you aren’t either’ (Bingham 2002: x). 11

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These notions on running were at odds with the commodified use of the body as a mere aesthetic conspicuous expression. Even though Bingham regarded the treadmill as a valuable device for training13 (something that would be conceived as heresy by the runners of the 1970s), he harshly criticised the variegated offer of fitness gadgets that focus on the shallow conception of the body image: There’s an industry devoted to promote this illusion. There are machines and devices that are designed to convince you that you can have someone else’s legs, or arms or abdominal muscles. There are television shows and info commercials that take advantage of our insecurities with our bodies. (1999: 48) The fitness concept, replaced by the notion of wellness, pointed directly to the dynamic construction of the self: ‘Being fit isn’t a goal or destination—it’s a way of living life, a natural state’ (Bingham 2002: 128). The author endorsed a personal definition of success, not bound by an external definition gauged by competitive standards: I like to run even though I’m not, by their standard any good at it. What matters to me it’s that I like to run, not what they think about my running. Maybe it’s a 60s thing—Power to the penguins! (Bingham 2002: 155) A sense of loving community is also present in the races.14 Attached to this 1960s’ spirit, a romanticised character of a natural past came to the fore:

 Advertisements for treadmills and training devices such as Nordic Track continued to appear in Runner’s World. For instance, in the December issue of 1992, an article called ‘Tread on me’ presents the advantages of treadmill training, especially in winter; in the December issue of 1993 an article called ‘Tread Ahead’ also dissected the advantages of proper training using the treadmill (pp. 47–53). 14  ‘As I don’t have any hurry, I have time to give away a thousand smiles: for me, as for other runners, races aren’t only chances to do something good for us but for other people too’ (Bingham 2002: 155). 13

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Now it is the time to give in to your running instinct. Today is the day to let go all the unrealistic expectations and uncover the primal joy of running. It may be that, like me, the more you run, the more connected you will feel to your running ancestors. (Bingham 1999: 42) Bingham’s books proselytised against the conspicuous consumer culture and the competitive side of shallow capitalism, but at the same time, he cherished buying specialised expensive running equipment: You know you’re a runner when you start using words like Coolmax, Dri-­line, Dri-fit as part of your daily vocabulary. You know you’re an informed runner when the mere thought of running in a cotton T-shirt sounds as sensible to you as putting your shoes on the wrong feet. (2002: 39) The bottom line of Bingham’s message was that runners should not plainly reject buying expensive gear; they should only reject artificial displays of superiorism. Consumer culture was good as long as it was bound to the functional, not to mere luxury and showing-off strategies.

9.5 Concluding Remarks The practice of jogging/running in the USA during the second half of the twentieth century unfolded through a spiralling informalising trend, going through different phases of informalisation and reformalisation. The social integration of different social groups (e.g. class and gender) and a blend of social codes was observable in physical activities such as jogging/running. The first phase in the development of the activity presented a formalising-informalising balance in which the formalising trend maintained a certain predominance during the 1960s, associated to the biomedical profession and trainers from the pre-war era. During the 1970s, the informalising trend gained the upper hand, featuring an anti-­ institutional, naturalistic, self-help approach and a holistic notion of health. Jogging/running was mainly understood as leisure in which self-­ discovery and personal expression were of the utmost importance. In the

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1980s, an early reformalisation ensued. A decade in which employment and health policies became based upon individual responsibility, the healthy, athletic, hard body emerged as the image of success. The reception of jogging/running as a means for fitness was conspicuously adopted by the younger generation of yuppies: people in an upstart disposition, with the need to settle down professionally and displaying a reformalisation of countercultural ideals: flexibility and freedom blended with control and stability. The bodies of yuppies epitomised the neoliberal credo, presenting individual responsibility and status achieving as the desirable attitude both at the workplace and through leisure activities. In the 1990s, a late reformalisation phase continued blending values associated with the 1960s and 1970s and the consumer culture of the 1980s. This synthesis gave birth to a kind of runner’s lifestyle characterised by a nostalgic recuperation of authenticity, freedom and nature within the framework of responsible ecologism. This section closes with a few words on what happened to running after the year 2000 from the perspective of informalisation theory. The current third worldwide explosion of running expresses a new spiralling informalising/reformalising global phase. Cristopher McDougall’s book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, published in 2009, was at the epicentre of the new running movement in which trail running (running through mountain courses) and cross-country running increasingly gained more prominence. The new running gospel, based on the idea of barefoot running, minimalism and dieting practices such as veganism and paleo (hunter-­ gatherers) diet, tried to recover indigenous practices—the tribe to which McDougall referred were the Mexican Tarahumara—in another twist of the ‘back to adventurous nature, out of the polluted and overfed comfortable Western lifestyle’ message. In this global informalising/reformalising phase, the identification with outsider groups focuses on ethnicity: for example, local tribes living in developing conditions. The phenomenon of Obstacle Course Racing (OCR) also unfolds within this global informalising/reformalising phase, blending romanticised commodified images of past warriors (Spartan Race), inclement weather conditions, thrills and good fun for urban dwellers.

10 Informalisation and Integration Conflicts: The Two-Faced Reception of Migrants in the Netherlands Arjan Post

10.1 Introduction: Informalisation and Re-formalisation One of the features of established-outsider relations is ‘in-group blindness’ towards the long histories during which dominant codes of conduct have emerged. Concealed behind what is generally perceived as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ manners, to which non-Western newcomers must adapt to swiftly, is a social learning process in which similar tensions and conflicts took place between majorities and minorities in the development of national codes. This sense of development is hidden by the dynamics of large-scale interweaving processes, in particular when it comes to irritations and quarrels over ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional’ manners and standards (Elias 1984). Half-forgotten in the discourse on multicultural society is a peculiar change at the beginning of the 1980s. That the 1960s and 1970s, as the For their comments on an earlier version, thanks to Rineke van Daalen, Cas Wouters and Michael Dunning, who also corrected my English.

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_10

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era of ‘revolution’, was over became obvious when public debates in Western countries on topics such as economic downturns and the rise of crime also involved complaints about declining civility and morality. Opinion polls indicated a rising wish for stricter rules and rigid enforcement by the authorities, while politicians called for a ‘moral revival’, ‘new virtue’ or ‘restoration’, as well as austerity and frugality, to fight the ‘disease’ of overspending. Thus, the resistance against social inequalities and prevailing social structures waned in favour of accommodation and resignation towards them. Historical phases in which manners and emotional restraints become stricter and fixed or more lenient and flexible alternate between these processes. The informalisation of manners and feeling codes succeeded a civilising process that was dominated by formalising and hierarchy-­ forming processes of previous centuries (see also Chapter 1 in this book). Informalisation became dominant near the end of the nineteenth century with greater lenience in codes of social conduct in all kinds of relations. Illustrative of this are the short-term phases such as the Fin de Siècle, the Roaring Twenties and the spurt in the 1960s and 1970s, during which sexual and intimate relations, especially, demonstrated the ‘emancipation of emotions’ together with—all too often disregarded—higher demands on self-regulation. These spurts were followed by short-term periods of re-formalisation, in which earlier informalisation phases were accepted and integrated in the standard codes. Therefore, the short-term phase of re-formalisation in the 1980s and 1990s cannot be considered as a regression. Informal codes of conduct and feeling were not simply undone; rather, their expansion slowed down, some abandoned or came to an end. On the whole they were incorporated—formalised—into the dominant codes and ideals. The renewed focus on discipline and rules thus collided with a stronger awareness of and orientation towards consensus in morals, moral consciousness and manners themselves. Where dominant modes of conduct are ignored and attacked as symbols of institutionalised power relationships during currents of informalisation, they come into view and are revalued during phases of re-formalisation. These changes coincided with a change in perspective from an identification with outsiders to an identification with established groups,

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regarded in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and other Western countries as a ‘conservative wave’ and the rise of the ‘new right’.1 Apart from shifts in opinions, hopes and fears, it was marked by a sudden requirement for new manners books in the early 1980s, after being absent for about two decades (Wouters 2007: 176–181). Accordingly, after studying the popular Dutch women’s magazine Margret and its agony column to which readers for many decades submitted their ‘emotion letters’, I concluded a similar shift in the direction towards re-formalisation in the 1980s and 1990s.2 (Interestingly enough, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous statement ‘There is no such thing as society’ was also made in a popular women’s magazine, in an interview for Women’s Own.)3 Readers, as well as the answers given by psychosocial experts, displayed the longing for stricter morals and manners and a growing awareness of a wider society, ‘the world’ and ‘the future’ (Post 2004). To identify changes in manners and emotion regulation, I focused on the sexes and the generations. I found indications of tensions and changes between and within the old established Dutch; the moral panic was theirs, so to speak. Regarding more recent anxieties over refugees and the integration of non-Western immigrants, this nearly forgotten preoccupation with manners is in hindsight intriguing. What happened to the claim of ‘moral decay’ of the established? What about the outsiders at that time? And how is the silencing of this preoccupation related to the integration of newcomers and the encounter with them? Taking the Margret material as a reflection of common codes and ideals of ‘average people’ (reaching 3.5 million readers, of whom women made up 65 per cent in 1982 and 81 per cent in 1998), the basis of an  For the Netherlands, see SCP (1996: 468–471).  On the basis of a little less than 2500 ‘emotion letters’ to ‘Margriet Weet Raad’ (Margret’s Advice) in a popular Dutch women’s magazine. My study was a sequel of a more extensive one by the Dutch sociologists Christien Brinkgreve and Michel Korzec (1979) spanning from 1938 to 1977. Their findings generally apply to Wouters’s established long-term phase of informalisation. They detected a shift in the interpretation of problems and the corresponding advices from moralisation (sin, guilt, moral failure) towards psychologisation. 3  Thanks to Michael Dunning for this observation. 1 2

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answer is already apparent. As I remembered, there were some letters referring to ‘minorities’ which I had assembled in the vast category of rules and tolerance. Had I glossed over certain tensions, or had the magazine perhaps? I decided to dust off my old research folders. After all, too many sociologists tend to retreat into the present, as Elias (2009) suggests. In this chapter I examine how relations between the ‘old’ Dutch inhabitants and newcomers and their children have changed over recent decades. As a starting point I take the letters and advice on ‘ethnic minorities’. I interpret why the material itself referred only in a very limited way to the arrival of and problems with newcomers. Then these findings are put in the context of governmental and societal changes, to assert to what extent they are part of the re-formalisation trend. Together this bolsters a conclusion in which tensions and conflicts are regarded as the side effects of long-term and large-scale integration processes, rather than disintegration processes.

10.2 The Minorisation of Minorities My final thesis was a sequel of Brinkgreve and Korzec’s (1979) study of changes in an agony column in the popular Dutch women’s magazine Margret between 1938 and 1977. In their report they had already included a category entitled ‘ethnical differences’. The minor importance of it, though, could hardly be overlooked: for the summary only one half of a small page was used. The few letters on this topic (the exact amount is unknown) concerned complaints of girls whose parents opposed courting boys from a Dutch East Indies (Indonesian) or Surinamese background. As long as they were ‘neat and decent’, there was no problem to Margret. At the same time, this advice condemned the readers’ disdain for nonwhites. Nonetheless the magazine’s ‘advice panel’ warned the readers that ‘non-whites’ could be ‘different’. To a 17-year-old girl who was in love with a ‘negro’, the response in 1962 was: You should be aware, child, that most negroes (who in general are intelligent) in many respects have different opinions than white peo-

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ple, and in many circumstances act and react differently. Mind you: I absolutely do not want to stipulate that they are inferior to us, they are different. (Brinkgreve and Korzec 1979: 46, my translation AP) In my new material—again studied every four years—the word ‘negro’ is already banned. Another difference is that in the original study most immigrants were Surinamese and Antillean people; when I took the baton from 1978, the Netherlands had acquired a much larger variety of people from abroad, among them 120,000 guest workers from Turkey and Morocco. Not once in the later material, though, are they referred to as Muslims, only as ‘foreigners’ or as Turks and Moroccans. This is probably an example of a generic ‘colour-blindness’ in which any hint of a race was cautiously avoided, which followed from the ‘pre-multicultural’ assimilation of Dutch East Indians, or Moluccans, in the early 1950s after the dismantling of the Dutch colony. The few letters to Margret under this theme express concerns about mixed marriages, children having ‘foreigner’ friends, and a native Dutch woman who fears that her Turkish mother-in-law wants to ‘set things straight’ in her house (Margret 1978: 74). Colour is not the issue here, but in contrast to the letters used in Brinkgreve and Korzec’s original study, letters such as these are not overly politically correct. The tenor seems rather dauntless and direct, thus displaying the editorial board’s intention to be a little ahead of its time. Cultural differences, for example, are considered as self-evidently problematic; they should be encountered with reserve and awareness. To the woman with the Turkish mother-in-law the answer reads: ‘I would strongly dissuade you to agree with this.’ In the same breath she is warned of the possibility that ‘grandma will take your child’ to Turkey, where it would serve as ‘bait’ to have the mother coming over. This can hardly be considered as cultural relativism. To a young woman who writes she is having problems with her family whose members do not appreciate her having a Turkish friend, Margret’s advice points out that she cannot muster admiration for them. At the same time though, Margret stresses ‘he should try to fit in as well’. She refers the author of the letter to an advisory body—engaged in ‘participation’ and support—with regard to for-

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eigners (Margret 1978: 59). This kind of re-directing of readers to the vast infrastructure of sociocultural organisations was for a long time customary in the magazine; only in retrospect does it appear to have the function of keeping its distance: the issue is not the actual relation or encounter with ‘foreigners’, but the way Margret’s readers cope with them and how this affects their well-being. This is not to say the matter of discrimination is unimportant. Take, for example, the letter in which an 18-year-old woman complains about her father because he does not want to receive her Spanish boyfriend in his house: ‘He has this anticipatory hatred against all foreigners, especially when they have a slightly different skin colour.’ In this case, Margret’s anger is hardly concealed by stating her father is ‘guilty of terrible discrimination’ (Margret 1978: 70). Several other letters contribute to the same impression, dealing with more formal questions about rights, facilities and naturalisation procedures. Respect, self-respect and ‘honesty’ are generally predominant in the advice between 1978 and 1982. In the 1986 volume of Margret the formal anti-discrimination message seems to be accompanied by more of a no-nonsense disposition. A woman writing about her adopted children from Sri Lanka and the ‘silly and unashamed comments’ she gets over the difficulties in bringing them up, as well as their ‘remarkable darkness’, initially meets a principled stand from Margret, but that is not where it ends: Perhaps because of your own uncertainty you are focussing on these unfavourable reactions. By doing so, even nice responses or nicely intended responses are perceived as unfavourable. Why haven’t you just remonstrated to that man on the street: ‘Yes, these are children from Sri Lanka, adopted by my husband and me. These are our children’? All the same it indicates that you do not feel sure of yourself, and uncertainty makes you thin-skinned. (Margret 1986: 31) In advice such as this there is still something left of the old encouragement of assertiveness that used to constitute pleas for equality between the sexes. Nonetheless, the vigour with which racism was condemned in earlier advice seems to have been replaced by a more phlegmatic

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composed and individual approach: not merely against discrimination as such but rather in favour of coping with it. This, in a way, is to be expected in a magazine which, not least by its readers, by then had done away with ‘old-fashioned’ psychologising, ‘nagging’ emancipation and ‘open sandals and woolly socks’ (see Post 2004: 90). This more realistic tenor also emerged in a few other examples of problems and advice. In a separate contemplation the ‘on-call’ psychologist points to the striving for distinction and the disadvantage of having freckles or an accent. She writes: A family of white parents with black children stands out also. […] You can try to protect your children against it, but they get more out of it by making sure they will not be affected by it. By continuously showing them, calm and firm, an example of how you could respond to people’s remarks. (Margret 1986: 31–32) In the later volumes from 1990 onwards, the entire topic appears to have vanished; even in letters from 1994 (a period in which unemployment among minority groups reached about 40 per cent) where youth crime, ‘zero tolerance’ and public safety are at the forefront of concerns, not one word is written over the encounter with ‘different others’. Close reading yields that Margret’s audience is preoccupied with itself, its job opportunities, sleepless nights and one-person households, apart from concerns with unemployment, morals and ‘the future’ in general. This hiatus, in part, is seeking to gratify its target audience, as should be expected in a commercial magazine. More generally, macro-­sociological explanations hint at trends of ‘internationalisation’ and ‘individualisation’. But another part demands the explanation of what is being untold and possibly left out. Once again, this ought to be considered in relation to earlier volumes that covered issues of engaging with ‘foreigners’. What could be behind Margret’s later silence on the issue? The minor importance of the topic to the magazine in itself exemplifies a process of ‘minorisation’ (Rath 1993). Apart from the governmental focus on the ethnic identities of target groups, as will be discussed below, after the 1970s and during the 1980s many sources indicate a rising pru-

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dence in encounters with newcomers. The words used to refer to newcomers alone are weighed carefully. The fear of being accused of racism was combined with an anti-discrimination moralism, expressed in a perpetuating shifting vocabulary, from ‘strangers’ (vreemdelingen), ‘guest workers’ (gastarbeiders), ‘buitenlanders’ (foreigners), ‘minderheden’ (minorities) to ‘allochtonen’ (non-natives). It is no exaggeration to say that the Dutch faced an ‘ethnic taboo’ (Vuijsje 2000). When dealing with the unease of ‘getting closer’, established and outsider groups have several strategies at their disposal. One of them is prominent during first encounters: circumspection and avoidance. With this they can cautiously lean towards each other without losing their comfort, that is, losing the self-image and self-respect they have through their social position and status. ‘Avoidance behaviour’ and the maintenance of reserve thus help people to deal with tensions and to strangle conflicts at birth. This social and emotional distance allows for ‘decency’ and ‘harmony’ and prevents people from higher strata developing status insecurity, but at the same time obstructs people of lower status from climbing the social ladder. By doing so, as Wouters (2007) demonstrates in his work on manners and distinction, people evade all sorts of irritations. For a long time they were thus able to protect and maintain their self-restraint, afraid of being contaminated by ‘lower emotions’ of the lower strata or classes dangereuse (see Elias and Scotson 2008; cf. de Swaan 1981). The counterpart of this suppressed resentment was a patronising and romantic depiction of guest workers. Altogether this amounted to a fairly low rate of mutual identification, despite the impression of tolerance and forbearance. As Johan Goudsblom (2007b) has stressed, tolerance is not so much the endurance but rather renouncing the use of coercion. It follows that tolerance free of balances of power as opposed to coercion does not exist. Power differentials are one of the aspects of established-outsider figurations that are cautiously concealed; the kind of tolerance that preceded the later tensions and conflicts could, therefore, hardly be considered as an indication of integration, especially since this was not a favoured approach until the end of the 1980s (see also Elias 1984; Post 2016).

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10.3 F rom Xenophilia to Xenophobia4 in the 1980s Despite expectations, Turks and Moroccans have stayed in the Netherlands permanently and have become Dutch citizens. Generated by the dialectics of the modern-world system, guest workers ‘came’ because of the scarcity of Dutch low-skilled labour for mining, shipbuilding and textile processing, and so they stayed because of the recession and the oil crisis engendered by Arabic states in 1973 and 1979. The welfare state and social rights play an important role too. Government organised ‘regulations’ in the mid-1970s for most illegal immigrants—up to 15,000—to be given residential status. Shortly after the economic recession in the late 1970s, the recruitment of new immigrants was stopped and borders were closed, but as an unintended consequence guest workers decided to settle and—supported by the right-wing liberal party and Christian preoccupation with family values—brought their spouses and children over, thus quintupling the original numbers of migrants from Mediterranean countries to about 650,000 at the end of the 1990s (Lucassen and Lucassen 2015: 76–81). During the reception of Dutch immigrants, three phases could be distinguished: (1) the arrival in the 1950s of people from the former Dutch East Indies (among them Moluccans), Cape Verdians, Italians, Spaniards, Surinamese, Arubans and Antilleans along the old colonial lines; (2) the arrival in the 1960s and 1970s of people from Italy, Turkey and Morocco, respectively, their children and spouses; and (3) the arrival of refugees mainly from Africa, Asia and former Yugoslavia. The first phase entailed a general assimilationist approach, except for the segregation policy on Moluccans, who were initially supposed to return to the former Dutch colony. During the second phase, however, this exception was elevated to official policy by the principle of ‘integration with maintenance of own culture’. This brought about a ‘two-track policy’ (WRR 2001: 168): the

 The shift from  xenophilia to  xenophobia is an  expression I’ve borrowed from Roos Wouters (1997). 4

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expected return of South-European migrants and fostering integration simultaneously. The focus on ‘foreign identities’—education in one’s own language and culture—was effectuated by governmental arrangements and subsidies. The third phase was often a mixture of both approaches, but in reality, the return to the assimilationist policy had gained the upper hand. In the 1970s, in particular, a remarkable paradox was constituted: treating newcomers equally, while differences had to be acknowledged and ignored simultaneously. Soon after, on the basis of this two-faced strategy, a common thread in the Dutch reception of migrants—the official ‘minority policy’—was formulated: this was not to accommodate pluralism but to bolster the return of guest workers. In practice the initial arrangements, for example, on bilingual education, soon turned out to be a tangle of good intentions and conflicting interests. However, the predominant code of engaging with newcomers consisted of ‘tolerance’ based on a widely supported ethos of equality. This code of behaviour has a twofold explanation: it was evoked by the conviction, again, that migrant workers would soon leave, and it was the upshot of an ‘ethical revolution’ (see Lucassen and Lucassen 2015: 83) by which differences became taboo. Authors in this respect refer to post-war decolonisation and democratisation processes, and especially for the Netherlands, to the ‘moral compass’ of the Second World War, during which the survival rate of Dutch Jews was significantly lower than in other countries (Buruma 2006; Vuijsje 2000). However, at that time, newcomers found themselves in the middle of a fervid phase of informalisation. Not a tainted past but rather a tumultuous present was prominent. At that point, equality as a guiding light was already being praised before it had been effectuated: backlogs and deprivation were painstakingly disregarded. For many years this contributed to a ‘multicultural’ atmosphere in which virtually all outsider groups, such as labourers, women, homosexuals, children and psychiatric patients, joined in broad emancipation and integration processes. And then the 1980s commenced. As a reaction to the severe economic crisis, most Western countries abandoned the old national Keynesian consensus in favour of a transnational market economy, accompanied by a turn in the political atmosphere; entrepreneurship and private wealth

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won prestige and were displayed more openly, following the deregulation of the financial sector, the lowering of tax rates on capital gains, corporate profits and high incomes, and cuts to public social expenditure. Rising national inequalities—functions of global interdependencies (Wilterdink 2016)—also affected migrants’ socioeconomic positions, as the quest for low-skilled labour rapidly diminished. When it became clear that they were settling permanently, the minorities policy of 1983 was charged not only with ‘multicultural’ ideals but conjointly with ‘technocratic’ aims (van de Beek 2010: 375ff.) to take care of disadvantaged positions. Alongside, the political focus turned towards the extent to which newcomers relied on welfare arrangements. The cost issue came to outshine moral connotations of immigration; the call for reforms and the reduction of ‘inactivity’ and dependency on benefits among non-Western ‘non-­natives’ swelled. Meanwhile, despite stricter measures (asylum), immigration increased again. The technocratic approach entailed a rising monopoly of minority experts and researchers, thus leaving important issues to a large extent ‘depoliticised’. This gave room to ‘specific taboos’ in science and politics, in the first place incited by the fear of the growing adherence to right-­ wing extremist parties. Due to the economic crisis, particularly in the old city districts, Dutch lower-class people found themselves competing with immigrants for the same jobs, housing and social services. Therefore, the technocratic approach was also intended to take the wind out of the extreme nationalists’ sails. The Central Party (Centrumpartij) was the first exponent in Parliament to stand up for the interests of the old established Dutch and against the integration of newcomers (ibid: 375). This approach gave rise to a general pattern of avoidance behaviour. As a remnant of the old system of ideological ‘pillarisation’, experts and ‘gentlemen’ as representatives of social groups strove for conflict avoidance: in Parliament, but also far beyond. This ‘fulsome consensus approach’, in which distance and reserve was preferred over confrontation, was also impelled by the acceleration of internationalisation at that time. Dominant views on immigration and integration took a turn. It became clear that a multicultural society had never existed; there had only been a high-pitched ideal by virtue of distance and avoidance (Duyvendak and Scholten 2012: 331–348). The central premise of strictly delineated and

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homogeneous cultures that, somehow, existed in the plural was sacrificed to the uneasy process of coming closer together in one social entity. Meanwhile the fear of the extreme right and ‘race riots’ as took place in London and other cities in the UK—ending up in about 70 casualties— was rising in the Netherlands, in particular after the murder of a young Antillean boy by a skinhead in Amsterdam. However, resentment was simmering on the left as well. The notorious pamphlet of the Socialist Party titled Guest Work and Capital in 1983 is a telling example. Its message was that the working class feared for their jobs and for big employers exploiting guest workers, thus dividing and subordinating the ‘old’ labourers. Labour unions then refused to take action against discrimination and ethnic exploitation. What the socialists were mostly criticised for, though, was their ‘cultural’ superiority stance against ‘strange workers from the countryside’, who practised Islam and therefore ‘have great trouble adapting to the work and living customs of our country’ (Lucassen and Lucassen 2015: 88–89). As is mostly forgotten, these developments went along with a ‘conservative tide’. In the Netherlands the prime minister called for a ‘moral revival’ and his successor aimed with his ‘no-nonsense policy’ for a moral offensive by reminding Dutch people that they not only had rights but duties as well; the UK had Thatcher (later on John Major) and the United States had Reagan. As the collective rise of various social groups came to an end, the ‘identification with stronger and established people’ instead of ‘underdogs’ returned. Accordingly, the former social upward pressure turned into a downward pressure exerted by established groups. Under such conditions individuals are on their own to climb the social ladder (Wouters 1986). In Margret the earlier appeal to emancipation and resistance changed into a more consensual and worried perspective in which dominant manners and ‘normality’ were embraced. In retrospective, these indications coincided with a broad ‘pessimistic turn’ with regard to the integration of newcomers (Lucassen and Lucassen 2015: 73 and 86). When guest workers turned into newcomers, the ethical spirit that had underlined equality and informal manners gradually started to fade. Accordingly, social protest was no longer mainly directed at the establishment, as had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s, but towards anything perceived as threatening the established order. It is in

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this social climate that in most rich countries the tensions surrounding immigrants and newcomers have been rising (Wouters 1998b, 2007: 220). This is also likely to be the reason for Margret’s swing of the pendulum—indicating a general change in collective feelings, images and experiences—towards a more no-nonsense tenor instead of her principled anti-discrimination arguments. Moreover, this period is seen as the nursery of ‘new realism’; politicians and intellectuals lost their reluctance to ‘address true problems’ while championing the previous ‘silent majority’ (Prins 2002). This corresponds with Margret’s silence in later volumes. Most probably, it would be too painful to write about migrants and their moral ‘shortcomings’ in the same fashion as she addressed them to established readers. Under the pessimistic circumstances of the 1980s, the former emphasis on group empowerment and ethnic differences gradually faded in favour of individual socioeconomic integration and ‘participation’. With that, a stress on citizenship and compulsory Dutch language courses was heralded. At this point, the charge and meaning of migrant’s various backgrounds changed radically. This could be an incisive illustration of C. Wright Mills’s (1971: 160) dictum ‘the concept of culture is one of the spongiest words in social science’. Where culture initially was conceived as a means to subdue tensions (e.g. by offering Moluccans a degree of autonomy in order to avoid violent outbursts against the government’s refusal for an independent state) and to support integration (e.g. by subsidising cultural activities and bilingual education to all migrant groups), it later became a stick to beat the dog. As discontent was surging, ‘strangers’ and ‘strangeness’ were increasingly placed under the magnifying glass; ‘cultural’ differences were perceived as the pith of rising tensions. Not only did identification with outsiders turn to identification with established, and likewise a downward perspective turned into an upward one, but also the perception of social problems among newcomers changed: from a ‘minority of the best’ to a ‘minority of the worst’ (Elias and Scotson 2008: 5, 183). With this, the societal dimension of manners suddenly became a problem solely of newcomers, thus obscuring interactions or associations between established and outsiders as indicators of civilisation (Waldhoff 1995: 18, 21).

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In the Netherlands as well as in other European countries, ‘a mixture of xenophobia, nationalism, social conservatism and authoritarianism’ was observed in the 1980s (Dekker 2000: 59–62). Yet the definite end so far of xenophilia and mixophilia—the approval of people mixing and mingling—came with the protests against the fatwa over Salman Rushdie in 1989. The banning and burning of The Satanic Verses were succeeded by riots worldwide, including in Rotterdam and The Hague, as the Dutch translation coincided with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. Soon after resentment against an Islamic ‘Trojan horse’ came to light, that is, in mainstream media; years before journalists already wrote about how tram drivers feared ‘pickpocketing foreigners’ and Islam, together with their resentment of social-democracy (see Westerloo 2003 [1984]: 49–51). Thus, cultural relativism began to lose credibility as xenophobia was rising, not least among left-wing writers and intellectuals, whose repugnance was convoked by the ‘Islamic fury’. As a phase of rapidly expanding global interdependencies this narrow cultural fixture spread as differences between established and outsider groups were peddled. This was exemplified by the broad ‘native’ longing for stricter morals and manners in the 1980s and the extent to which ‘nonnatives’ disapprove of Western ‘permissiveness’ and ‘indecency’ (cf. Norris and Inglehart 2012). This can be seen, as Wouters (2012: 231–240; cf. Gomperts 2005; Waldhoff 1995) has indicated, in people who are immigrants from countries where hierarchy plays a greater role and where obedience, not asking or contradicting superiors, denying problems, honour, feminine chastity and loyalty are much more common. In contrast, the Dutch informal manners were generally, particularly among immigrants, perceived as irreverent and immoral. This was kept a secret though, as much as the fact that native Dutch people too had dealt for a long time with similar hierarchy-based manners and emotions, roughly until the mid-1960s. After the Rushdie affair, politicians and publicists started to attack Islam and what they saw as other ‘social pollutants’. From there on, it was the right spectrum that took over criticism from the left. The longing for moral rearmament and national unification constituted the footing of a different approach towards newcomers (read: Muslims), as was demonstrated by conservative liberal Frits Bolkestein in the early 1990s. Not only did he declare Islamic culture inferior to the Western heritage of

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Enlightenment, but in doing so, he simultaneously swept the ‘left’ origins of the attack on political correctness under the carpet. This intervention is to be regarded as yet another example of the developments already started in the early 1980s (cf. Prins 2002). The resentment against Muslim newcomers was taken further by the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 9/11. This, as almost everywhere else in Western world, gave rise to a new reluctance and resistance.5 Worries over a growing underclass and accusations against liberal politics intertwined with a rather essentialist definition of ‘indigenous’ culture to which newcomers one-sidedly must adapt to. A broad spectrum of revanchist movements, having both left- and right-wing roots, pullulated in most Western countries. Despite their differences, these movements share a neonativistic and law and order agenda with a communitarian vision of ‘the people’ (Mudde 2007). Further quarrels and controversies in recent years all display a general polarisation in Western societies (see Rommel 2017). This applies from issues of ‘every-day racism’ and ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2016) to, especially in the Netherlands, the challenged tradition of black Pete,6 disputed  In the Netherlands a prominent representative of new populism was Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002 by a vegan radical, while running for minister president (two years later the director of a Koran critical film was murdered by a Dutch jihadi). As many other populists Fortuyn had Marxist roots; the same holds, for example, for former Labour Party member and publicist Paul Scheffer, who wrote his influential newspaper article ‘The Multicultural Drama’ in 2000 (see Scheffer 2011). Explanations of the leftist pedigree of populism (see also Buruma 2006, chapter 1; Lucassen and Lucassen 2015) would start by assessing the burden of untenable superior idealism, along with the crumbling of social classes by social integration, welfare arrangements and, later, the rise of an ‘individualistic’ meritocracy and the embrace of the Third Way. 6  The Dutch tradition of Saint Nicolas (Sinterklaas) is rooted in mid-nineteenth century and recently encountered serious objections by people of colour. Especially black Pete (zwarte Piet), the black-faced helper of Saint Nicolas, traditionally rigged with a nose-ring and golden earrings and acting stupid, had connotations with eighteenth-century slaves to them. One could reason, however, it is not a mere issue of race here; as part of the broad informalisation phase, authorities came down off their thrown, among them Saint Nicolas with his ‘big book’ in which all (bad) manners of (disobedient) children were kept record of. 5

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historical symbols and dealing with the colonial past. These ­so-­called culture wars—rapidly imported from the United States—are widely reported in the media and amplified in social media. What these issues indicate is a strong ideological involvement and a stark tendency to attribute ‘blame’ to this or that party, politician or pundit to the detriment of analytical detachment (Elias 2007b; cf. van den Bergh 1986). The same holds for studied interpretations in which the rising level of tensions and conflicts in immigration societies is reduced to intellectual affairs: to ‘the flaw of the left’, ‘the upturn towards the right’ or tenets imposed by ‘agents’. What stays obscure are the unintended consequences of complex interweaving processes. These are comprised of not only the discomfort of proximity but, conjointly, degrees of ‘national amnesia’ with respect to the development and change of behavioural codes and ideals. The moral panic of the early 1980s over the established standards of conduct can serve as a peculiar illustration: this entire preoccupation with the fears and anxieties involved in the new era of the 1980s was gradually transferred to ‘unruly’ newcomers and their ‘maladapted’ children, both as a problem and as a responsibility.

10.4 A  Multi-level Model of Integration Conflicts In explaining tensions and conflicts in Western immigration societies, theories that stress cultural and/or religious differences dominate. A thorn in the side of these explanations is neo-Marxist-inspired theories that emphasise the widening gap between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation. Irrespective of their legitimacy, much of the effort of these and other causation-based theories add to a tacit connotation of harmony to integration. As such, conflicts serve as ‘evidence’ of the lack of integration or even failure of it. As part of more equal and informal ways of bringing up children, the feared bishop turned into a friendly deliverer of presents. With that all references to submission, especially between black people and whites, became more painful and embarrassing. Not race, but power is the pivot here.

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Much earlier, Elias had already taken a sceptical stance against this notion. As could be argued, in all his writings, competition and conflict is the flywheel of social and psychic integration processes over time. These centripetal processes are almost invariably accompanied by centrifugal offshoots; conflicts do not come to pass only as side effects of interweaving, but they can also generate integration spurts. It is the structure of conflicts (cf. ‘process conflicts’ or ‘formative conflicts’, see Elias 1987, 2008a) that needs to be assessed. Changes in power balances are key to understand complex transformations. Very insightful for this are Elias’s incentives towards what could be taken as a multi-level model of integration (Elias 2008a, 2010b: 146ff.).7 The gist of it consists of the intertwining of discernible integration levels: state, intra-state and inter-state. Pivotal are profound changes in the whole social edifice brought about by expanding global interdependencies: in all rankings and social stratifications. These transformations and the conflict-ridden ways individuals and groups respond to the loss of power and functions can be regarded as ‘process universals’. This dynamic is the chorus of various kinds of interweaving examples throughout history, but it is pre-eminently applicable to ‘the integration of humanity’. What catches the eye is the emblematic counteraction taken on by ‘agents of disintegration spurts’. Usually neglected, though, is that large-­ scale integration processes also pose a threat for higher positions such as the

 Complementary to this multi-level model is a historical phase model of power balances, thus attaching the factor of time to power. In brief, this elaborates on Elias’s (2012a) phaseology of ‘colonisation or assimilation’ and ‘differentiation and emancipation’, with the extension of a third phase of ‘mutual identification versus dis-identification’ (see also van Stolk and Wouters 1987b; Wouters 1986, 2007; cf. de Swaan 1995). These two historical-dynamical models can help to understand not only the turbulence of expanding interdependencies but also the pressure towards co-­operation. That is, why certain phases tend to be ‘harmonious’ and others rather ‘conflictuous’. For a more comprehensive elaboration, see Post (forthcoming). 7

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West, experienced by Western people as a global upper class.8 Since power and status are attached to people’s social unit, members with influence will experience fundamental changes when the entire unit becomes interwoven on a higher level. For all sorts of leaders and chiefs, in fact for all superiors and rulers and groups of rulers (the West), this is accompanied by the loss of power and social degradation when they do not move along to the higher level. Many of them have to be content with presumably nothing more than middle positions. What they experience is a structural ‘defunctionalisation’: their authority, privileges and prestige are transferred to the higher strata of the newly emerged social units, ‘the top of humanity’. In this, the fate of influential people is comparable to former tribal chiefs and elders in village-states when their units integrated into (national, colonial or postcolonial) state societies, the most intrusive integration processes in human history thus far (Elias 2008a, 2010b: 148, 201; Mennell 2007: 214–248). At the same time a reverse movement emerges at a lower level of integration. Integration then involves a certain status gain for previous outsider groups. They rise by their mere inclusion on the social ladder, even if they are still located on the lower steps; at the same time the relative distance to the lower strata of recently declined established groups has suddenly decreased. This relative rise is hardly perceived as a gain, since competition increases strongly on these very steps. Where ‘old’ lower-­ skilled workers and their ‘new’ counterparts become interdependent, a new integration front is constituted (Post forthcoming). From a long-term perspective, former outsider groups are climbing the ladder, while middle groups—in particular their precarious members—experience a descending or, at least, the fear of ‘social sinking’ (Gidron and Hall 2017), because of the global extension of the ladder and thus the decline of their status. In this way the fear of ‘ethnic competitors’ from low-­skilled labourers  This writing by Elias (2012a) never met any acclaim, for it was long too painful for people to admit. However, as Cas Wouters pointed out in a personal communication, it is becoming a spreading and indivertible insight since the globalisation spurt in the 1980s; particularly since post-colonialism saw an upsurge of attacks on ‘white supremacy’, ‘white privileges’ and other unacknowledged remnants of superiority feelings that were rooted in slave-holding colonial nationstates (see also Chapter 5 of this book). 8

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spreads to a vast middle class, whereby economic precariousness merges into status anxiety. On a higher level, the same has happened with national politicians and elites, who have lost power and prestige to their global counterparts in boardrooms. Complex integration processes take place on different levels simultaneously. The appurtenant defunctionalisation and disintegration on lower levels is in itself a striking example of the ‘polyphonic’ rising and lowering of social groups over time (Elias and Scotson 2008; cf. McNeill 1992). From closer up, and more to the matter of the growing resentment in Europe, Elias has elaborated on what this means for the middle classes in situ. The social pressure they experience is aptly depicted by him as a Zweifrontenschicht, or a two-front stratum (Elias 2006b). This is also the multifaceted aspect of globalisation that is often neglected: the ­majority who, seen from a nation-centric perspective, constitute established groups are themselves subjected to integration processes. They are stuck between competitors on both lower and higher rungs. Feelings of humiliation (Smith 2006; Linklater 2018, chapter 7; cf. McNeill 1992: 11) and being disadvantaged are inherent in status comparisons between people in networks of interdependence. Again, this does not only apply to former outsider groups, but to former established groups as well. Depending on the integration level involved (social strata or states), the lengthening of interdependence chains thus for one part is accompanied with increasing distance and inequality where the length of the social ladder from bottom to top is considered; but for another part a counter-intuitive development of increasing proximity and equality occurs on or between specific rungs on the ladder (Koenis 2016: 121–147; van Krieken 2018; Milanovic 2016; Wouters 1990c; see also Chapter 5 of this book). Equality and inequality do not constitute a static opposition, the difference lies in one’s standpoint: the integration level and the unit of account (total ratio vs. close-up interval). This multi-level model could help comprehend why rising resentment in immigration societies is not a mere matter of material conditions, nor of ‘culture’ or ‘ideas’; it is rooted in this very split: competition and resistance are increasing, especially between ‘old’ and ‘new’ inhabitants and employees (proximity), while security measures, job safety and status attribution depend on higher strata (distance). After all, as C. Wright Mills has

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demonstrated in his classic The Power Elite, status follows the apex of the highest peaks of hierarchy and fame. However, a Marxist/Pikettyan thesis of mounting (class) inequalities cannot sufficiently explain recent tensions and conflicts regarding immigration and integration. Nor can it explain waning distances and hierarchies, the decline of strict differences and the ‘diminishing of contrasts and increasing varieties’ with respect to manners and emotions and status differences. In brief, to be investigated is the interplay of these major trends: how rising gaps between the haves and the have-nots simultaneously coincide with the narcissism of minor differences (Blok 2001: 115–135) between rulers and ruled, men and women, parents and children, established and outsiders. As Elias pointed out, in relation to increasing status insecurity and the search for identity: The sources of this disquietude, which have played an increasing role especially in the second half of the twentieth century, include the fact that the mainly unplanned decrease in power ratios between all the groups mentioned above has brought the extent of these power ratios, and the problem they pose to us, to many people’s conscious attention for the very first time. (Elias 2013a: 29, my italics AP) Here Elias is tapping into the long-term process of informalisation and the rising demands it brings. For Wouters (2007: 4), ‘the social constraints towards being unconstrained’ requires and presupposes an expansion of self-control; but it also pertains to a greater sensitivity and even aversion towards differences in power and displays of status, in particular in the Netherlands. Differences and distances thus became a problem in themselves, not only for educating children or imparting norms and rules but also for people’s ‘comparative’ self-esteem (cf. de Swaan 1989). After all, this equality ethos applies to all other people, including members of lower social strata and newcomers, and yet the pressure to adapt self-­evidently to the standards of elite groups has generally diminished. For the middle classes this engenders a confusing taboo when it comes to integration issues. Populist movements are rooted in this status struggle; their adherents are overrepresented in lower middle-class groups who are nearest to their new counterparts, and never the better-offs or the

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downtrodden (cf. Hochschild 2016; Inglehart and Norris 2017). This proximity and the status insecurity it yields is materialised in stubborn preoccupations with dominant manners as carriers of identity, and ultimately in mixophobia. This is substantiated not only by a smouldering discontent over democracy among conservative groups but also by new-­ right movements who share an ‘unequal value ideology’ to restore old social distances (Speit in Rommel 2017: 146). A comparable strategy is observed among the children of newcomers with an Islamic background who focus more on religious traditions. Yet, this is not a factual indication of deepening chasms, but instead of individual ways of coping with the confusion integration brings to identities and loyalties (Sterckx et al. 2003: 126; WRR 2001: 156). This alludes to the psychic dimension of integration. As Elias delineated, shifts in power balances run in tandem with changes in individual habitus. Since people’s personality is constituted in social units on lower levels of integration, they incline to hold on to the identifications corresponding with former social functions. This is of course what the ‘drag effect’ implies. Their dragging is yet not simply a matter of nostalgia, but it is rather a matter of ‘belongingness’ and self-preservation: for a long time, their old identification unit served as a survival unit and provided for ‘identity, pride and sense’. The fear of losing this altogether, writes Elias (2010b: 199–200), is experienced as ‘collective dying’, preceded by ‘group depressions’. This could also be the footing of the longing for stricter manners and morals: a sense of belonging. Commonly, the drag effect is used to explain the resistance of former established groups, which impels us to understand the rise of new-right movements, a ‘conservative revolution’ and the counteraction against refugees (Rommel 2017). However, there is also the other drag effect among newcomers. Apart from the fact that the majority of groups apply to Elias’s maxim of peoples as ‘mixing and changing continuities’ (in Waldhoff 1995: 246), it is this mirror image between ‘old’ and ‘new’ fanatics—the double bind between jihadism and alt-right (Dunning 2016; de Swaan forthcoming)—that provides for increasing polarisation and ‘brutalisation’. Notwithstanding the one-sided assimilationist ideology, implying there is one changeless and eternal ‘indigenous’

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culture, this indicates again that integration and its conflicts are mutual processes (Treibel 2015; Waldhoff 1995: 67, 259; cf. Elias 1984).

10.5 Reflection: The Paradox of Permissiveness These dynamics may help to grasp not only why conflicts over manners, lifestyles and orientations occur but also why they often drive the opposite of their aims. This could be called the paradox of permissiveness, addressing the intended use of ‘informal’ codes—especially regarding the equality of the sexes—as an ideological weapon against upwardly mobile newcomers and their rising self-esteem. As a response to their functional integration, in the Netherlands as well as in Europe more generally (see Halm and Sauer 2017; Huddleston et  al. 2015; Norris and Inglehart 2012; SCP 2016), politicians and public intellectuals began grandstanding with ‘modern’ codes and ideals. For a long time, these met with deep aversion, especially in the Christian and petty bourgeois milieu. All of a sudden ‘permissiveness’ appeared to be ingrained in them, populist parties included. Gay marriages, women’s rights, euthanasia, abortion, drinking holidays, rapid secularisation: it was all feigned as ‘typical’ and ‘immutably’ Dutch. Nothing could be more apocryphal. Moreover, it was propagated as ‘civilised’, implying that anyone who would oppose it is simply not civilised. The resemblance to the French in the eighteenth century, whose individual self-control appeared to be more differentiated, more all-round and more stable than those of previous generations (Elias 2012a: 403–417), is apparent; however, after declaring this development as complete within themselves, they started colonising Egypt under Napoleon on the same basis. By doing so, as Elias (57) demonstrated, they confused the blind historical process with national pride and personal merit. The re-formalisation spurt from the 1980s on was the upshot of expanding global interdependencies, as indicated above, to the extent that the collective emancipation of various outsider groups came to an end. This was inflicted upon migrants’ labour market and educational positions,

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and it brought discomfort and differences into the open. The seeds of the resentment against newcomers can therefore already be found in the early 1980s. Despite popular assumptions, though, it was not just a cunning strategy to keep newcomers at bay with a rigid assimilationist discourse, advocating ‘a vital intolerance carried by healthy patriotism’ (Spruyt 2003: 65); it was rather the unintended formalisation of previous informalisation that gave rise to a national consent over standards of conduct, as likewise a widespread value consensus in Europe (Bréchon and Gonthier 2017). Consequently, this supports conscious and unconscious defence mechanisms, or ‘reaction formations’ in psychoanalytical terms. Established groups close their ranks as a retort to rising outsider groups, thus providing for more cohesion and conformism as a power resource. What stays in the dark, then, is the rapid and on-going expansion of interdependencies. This goes hand in hand with ‘widening circles of identification’ (de Swaan 1995; cf. McNeill 1992) beyond the boundaries of ethnical, racial or national groups. A global shift in the ‘we-I balance’ towards ‘we’ (Elias 2010b) coincided with the broad historical transformation in which people in most Western countries have become more aware of their deeper emotions, such as fears and desires, which were hidden or neglected in more hierarchical relationships. During the process of informalisation, all emotions have been ‘emancipated’; people have learnt not only to express them but also to control them in more flexible and reflexive ways (Wouters 2007: 199ff.). When the level of tensions and conflicts is rising, it is the arousal—the ventilation of ‘dangerous emotions’—that retains wide attention and thus nourishes fears, worries and discontents among established groups, which in turn could pair new ‘they-images’ to ‘we-images’. However, in particular in the Netherlands vehement debates coincide with a rather low level of incidents hitherto:9 the ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ is often being overlooked.  As Wouters (2007: 225; see also Chapter 1, Sect. 1.7 in this book) has stressed, the strength of the ‘third-nature’ type of personality is persistently put to the test when social and psychic integration processes—in this case between and within established and outsider groups—continue, and continue to generate conflicts. 9

11 Formalisation and Informalisation of Meeting Manners Wilbert van Vree

11.1 The Meeting Concept As reported by modern dictionaries the most common meaning of the English word ‘meeting’ is prearranged gatherings of people talking mutually and making plans and agreements concerning their common future. In meetings—not necessarily face-to-face gatherings anymore, thanks to the telephone, internet, video—people talk and decide about what they are going to do and how to do it. They contribute to collective stories about how to think, feel and act as a military, political, economic, religious, scientific or any other organisation. The concept of ‘meeting manners’ refers to the dos and don’ts of meetings. The concept of ‘meeting’ is used as a sensitising concept (Blumer 1954). It refers to the typically human activity of posing, explaining and a­ nswering future-­oriented questions and involves functions such as sharing and extracting information, problem-solving, team building and confirming I am indebted to Donald LeBeau for his linguistic corrections and suggestions, Jan Joost Peskens for his beautiful photographs of Togunas, and Cas Wouters for his helpful comments on earlier drafts.

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_11

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common values. In less differentiated societies these activities are often embedded in other collective activities such as celebrating, playing games, commemorating, resolving conflicts, judging and administering justice. By and large, the present meeting concept refers to collective means of social orientation and coordination, distinguishing more peaceful ways of conflict regulation from more violent ways and predominantly verbal activities from predominantly non-verbal activities. This concept is not only found in the English word ‘meeting’ but also in other Western words, such as ‘möte’ (Swedish), ‘Versammlung’ (German), ‘vergadering’ (Dutch), ‘forsamling’ (Danish), ‘asamblea’ (Spanish), ‘réunion’ (French) and ‘riunione’ (Italian). These words form a verbal family. One sees this even more clearly when comparing the meanings of these words from the Middle Ages with the contemporary ones. The initial observation is that all these words have undergone a similar differentiation in meaning. They used to mean ‘coming and being together’ and now ‘coming and being together to discuss and make agreements’.1

11.2 T  he Emergence of Collective Steering Capacities Although the more differentiated or specialised meeting concept only arose in Western parliamentary-industrial societies, such activities as talking and deciding about their common future can also be observed in previous, smaller and less complex societies.

 Lexicographic sources show that some Western languages have one word for the same notion while others have several. English, French, and German have more particular and formal concepts, such as assembly, assemblée, and Tagung, which developed initially during a stage of state formation dominated by monarchs and nobility. Besides these words Western languages also have words for more general and informal meetings, like réunion, Versammlung, and of course meeting, developed predominantly in the subsequent stage of state formation when broader layers of the population attained access (often with violence) to various governmental functions and were integrated into national states (van Vree 1999, chapter 2). 1

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It is an exclusive, social steering capacity of human beings, Homo sapiens. The emergence of the meeting capacity is part of a ‘symbols revolution’, the development of socially standardised sound patterns involving speaking, thinking and knowing as three specifically human activities. In his book The Symbol Theory, Norbert Elias studies the development of these three activities as connected with the handling of symbols. ‘People who speak send messages to others by means of sound-waves articulated in accordance with the models of a communal language, knowledge of which they expect to share with potential receivers of the messages’ (Elias 2011: 85). People learn to think by ‘internalising’ speaking, but: [A]ttention is often focused exclusively on acts of thinking, performed in silence and perhaps in solitude by a single person, while even today, acts of thinking by way of discussions, of thinking in groups, are frequent events. Children are more inclined than adults to think aloud. In fact, thinking in silence and without any overt form of speaking has to be learned. (Elias 2011: 85) Primates and other animals never engage in discussions over an external defence, access to food, sex and shelter and leadership tasks. When a dispute over food, sexuality, leadership or anything else needs to be settled, the vying parties could fight to determine what the group does. “In animal groups, such fighting would be the process of politics itself. (…) In human bands, fighting, or near fighting, signals the beginning of the political process. In human groups, once the physical fighting is stopped— and such fighting occurs often enough—the unique political process of human beings, that is, discussion, begins”. In human bands, the unique combination of conscious awareness, intelligence and language not only empowered meetings but also produced the possibility for new forms of domination. As before, physical strength and aggression continued to be essential in external defence and still remain additional sources of power, but weapons skill, tactical and organisational leadership, and morale-boosting became more important than strength and aggression in human external and internal leadership (Glassman 2017: 22).

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11.3 Meetings in Foragers’ Societies We do not know anything about these early societies, but we may assume that group discussion and decision-making acts will have gradually developed from relatively undifferentiated, rather occasional and passing into more specialised social activities. Ethnographic literature presents a ­general, provisional image of meetings in relatively small societies of foragers (i.e. Jacobsen 1943; Myers 1986; Graham 1993; Glassman 2017). Observations indicate that in many well-known foragers’ societies, all members of the group participated in one way or another in the central decision-making processes. When a problem arises, it is discussed first in widening circles until it becomes obvious that a decision is needed and then the group ‘formally’ assembles: the adult men sit together in the centre of the band, surrounded by women, children and adolescents. This male ‘council’ is empowered to come up with a decision. Afterwards, there is a process of ‘healing’, consisting of discussions in smaller groups that function to re-establish the group solidarity, which had existed before the problem had created tensions. When territorial skirmishes intensified and warfare (organisation) became more central in a society, such relatively simple meetings probably became more differentiated and levelled, with the meetings of clans— enlarged family groups and bands—on the lower level and on the higher tribal level, meetings of the council of clan headmen or elders. A tribal council would also function as a negotiating body for confrontations with external groups. Via wars, tribal societies with a government by councils could develop into autocratically ruled warrior organisations.

11.4 Meetingisation and Autocratisation The restraint of physical violence, at least local and temporary, is an elementary condition for meetings. As long as effective and stable monopolies of organised violence were absent and fighting with weapons and struggle with words could alternate fluently, elaborate, ritualised rules of procedure will have been necessary to prevent the participants from killing each other at meetings (van Vree 1999: 21–66).

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Just how precarious meetings could be is illustrated by an event which took place during negotiations between the French heir to the throne and the Burgundian duke, John the Fearless, at the start of the fifteenth century. For the talks, a bridge had been spanned over the River Yonne. In the middle, a fence, with bars an arm-thick had been built across the entire width of the bridge. In the divide was a gateway with a door which could be locked on both sides, such that it was only possible to cross the divide if both parties agreed to it. During the talks the duke opened the door of the gateway, either upon his own initiative or upon the suggestion of the prince. The door on the other side was also opened. As soon as John and three of his men passed through the door, they were murdered. Perhaps the most characteristic of the prevailing standards of meeting in that society at that time was that John’s contemporaries were of the general opinion that he only had himself to blame for his untimely death. It was their conviction that he had not complied with the rules of the game and had been too careless. Consequently, only railings without gateways were constructed (Schneider 1977: 15–17). The long-term development of meetings coincides largely with the organisation of violence within basic entities, such as tribes, villages, towns, nation-states, confederations of nation-states—that is, within increasingly larger and more stable ‘survival units’ (Table 11.1). These units “exercised comparatively strict control over the use of physical force in relationships between their members. At the same time, they have allowed, and often encouraged, their members to use physical force against non-members” (Elias 2012b: 133–134). The central meetTable 11.1 Increasing scale of human cooperation (from Peter Turchin: ‘Ultrasociety’) Social scale (people)

Polity types

Times (kya)

10s 100s 1000s 10,000s 100,000s 1,000,000s 10,000,000s 100,000,000s

Foraging bands Farming villages Simple chiefdoms Complex chiefdoms Archaic states Macrostates Mega-empires Large nation-states

200 10 7.5 7 5 4.5 2.5 0.2

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ings of these units, in which the actions of an increasing number of people need to be coordinated, may be considered as ‘frontlines of civilization’ (van Vree 2011). At the top level of expansive meeting networks, decisions made in meetings determine to a great extent the possibilities and limits for ­meetings on lower levels of integration. The size of these networks and the corresponding rules of conduct have varied from social unit to social unit and throughout time. When collaboration within a survival unit was heavily forced by the threat or the use of physical violence and orders of authoritarian leaders and their associates, the expansion of meetings was limited and residual meetings were largely embedded in a hierarchical structure and modelled after military customs. The growth of human societies from foraging bands of several tens to a large federation of nation-states of hundreds of millions of individuals during the last 12,000 years coincided with ever-improving collaboration skills. The process of social integration was driven by the differentiation of social functions and particularly by competition and conflict between human groups, usually taking the form of warfare. In his study Ultrasociety (2016), Peter Turchin shows that in the long run, groups that outcompeted other ones had learned—among many other things—how to more effectively coordinate the actions of growing numbers of people. According to Turchin this ‘collaboration’ between larger groups of people can imply self-imposed bottom-up arrangements as well as coerced top-­ down arrangements and everything in between. In the first case we de facto see an increase in levels, number and types of meetings, and in the second case an expansion and differentiation of authoritarian forms of leadership. In the long-term process of social integration, decision-making through group discussion and that through physical power struggles, backed and followed by commands of strong leaders, have become two extremes of a gradually expanding and differentiating continuum of possible modes of how to regulate conflicts and tensions, coordinate actions and distribute scarce resources. Human societies as well as other social organisations move on this changing continuum, but as the interdependencies between people expanded and intensified, the oscillations became less extreme. This is an example of ‘diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties’, which is a major characteristic of civilising processes (Wouters: Chapter 5).

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When power differentials between rulers and ruled and between social strata decreased, the ‘meetingisation’ trend was dominant, whereas the ‘autocratisation’ trend was dominant when power differentials increased. In the long run, meetingisation was the dominant trend, but autocratisation always was present as counter-trend, sub-trend or dominant trend.

11.5 Meetingisation in Agrarian Societies For many thousands of years after the adoption of agriculture, warfare between groups remained temporary with periods of militarisation and centralisation alternating with periods of de-militarisation and de-­ centralisation. As long as military power did not become hereditary and central, war leaders could not order their followers around in times of peace; they had to lead instead by persuasion and example. The male council as the central meeting of a survival unit was often replaced by a council of elders (often including priests), which was accompanied and then substituted by a council of warriors, while the surrounding assembly of women and young people changed into an assembly of Arms-bearing men, young and professional warriors. When among herders and late agriculturalists warfare became total, territorially expansionary and genocidal, military organisation and leadership became dominant, the central meeting structure of survival units changed dramatically. As a result, from more permanent warfare emerged large chiefdoms and archaic states governed by despotic kings, claiming descent from the gods. During this phase of enlargement, increasing complexity and militarisation of agrarian societies meeting networks shrank and militarised, while the power of tyrants and despots often grew immensely. Usually, the warrior organisation became a terroristic retinue turned against its own population. Participation in central meetings that already was limited to men and then to warriors was now restricted further to the retinue of the king. The king with his war and court councils constituted the top of a pyramidal network of local officials and sporadic meetings with mainly judicial tasks and with few but severe rules modelled after the superior warrior councils.

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Meetingisation was a secondary trend in this specific phase of integration. Only on the edge of great empires, more ‘democratic’ meeting customs could sometimes survive or emerge at the village level and in commercial trading centres. On the periphery of the Mesopotamian and Egypt empires in trading cities, where the king’s presence was distant, “the council of elders—as city fathers—and even general assemblies of citizens, continued to exist” (Glassman 2017: 407). These meeting customs would flourish in a later integration phase, as with the tribes and city-states in ancient Greece. There we see the development of such refined manners and rules as majority voting at the assembly of citizens, office by lottery or election for a limited tenure term, instruments to measure speaking time and setting constitutional guidelines for the assembly and the courts. For the first time in history, specialised debating societies and schools arose that cultivated all kinds of meeting techniques along with oratorical and competitive rhetoric skills. According to Peter Turchin, the processes of increasing social inequality and autocratisation started to turn in the opposite direction with the invention of a new and exceptionally effective military technology resulting from the combination of horse-riding, composite bows and iron production. This military revolution began deep in the Eurasian steppe in 1000 BC and triggered momentous developments in the belt of agrarian societies stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to China. A number of cultural innovations were introduced that buttressed the capacity for cooperation in large groups. “These innovations included social norms and institutions that constrained rulers to act in less selfish and despotic ways. New ways of defining ‘us’ expanded the circle of cooperation beyond single ethno-linguistic groups. And Big Gods provided one solution to creating trust in huge, anonymous societies of millions” (Turchin 2016, chapter 10). In this phase of the development of social integration, meeting networks through which chiefs and kings governed and exerted their power on local levels began to expand. For instance, in the Roman Empire the Senate in Rome was the model for and an important centre of a dense web of provincial and local councils led by representatives of the emperor and completed with a native aristocracy. These meetings offered local nobles and rich men an opportunity to participate in the local government.

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Gradually and with many interruptions, twists and turns, meetingisation became the dominant trend again. More regular meetings in various contexts and on diverse hierarchical levels emerged; the dominant ­meeting culture de-militarised and de-ritualised, whereas civilians and lower layers of the population participated more and more in the expanding networks of meetings. These processes gained momentum in industrialising societies, starting in Europe where vestiges of the tribal assemblies had continued to exist and were revived in the city-states in the era of the expansion of commercial trade. Drawing on the experience of the mediaeval Italian cities, the northern European city-states with the collaboration of the governing military kingships invented a new central meeting institution: the representative parliament.

11.6 Parliamentarisation of Meeting Behaviour In the last few centuries, in most Western and then in many other countries, discussing and deciding about the monopolies of physical force and taxation became more public and also centred in elected national parliaments. While increasing numbers of people became more strongly tied to individual states, the competitive struggle for power, possession and status within states increasingly acquired the character of a regulated battle of words or a parliamentary struggle.2 From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, many national parliaments in the West developed from a structure bearing the character of a closed ‘debating club’ of like-minded notables into a public ‘arena’ where representatives of diverse social groups fought verbally for power, property and prestige. My research shows that the participants in the struggle were increasingly obliged to be more aware of their behaviour and control it more closely, particularly their manner of speaking and  I have pursued the rise and spread of national parliaments and the parliamentarisation of meeting behaviour in Europe and the USA in Meeting Manners and Civilisation, 1999: 205–255. 2

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their use of language. The parliamentary manners which they developed functioned increasingly as models for meetings at lower levels of integration, such as local councils, associations, unions and shareholders. Parliamentary regimes consist of rules which restrict the struggle between people to a verbal struggle, and as a rule the participants mutually acknowledge the outcome of that struggle. In comparison to ­autocratically regulated societies, where norms of ordering and obeying dominate, a parliamentary regime demands from participants that they develop a higher capacity to think for oneself and a greater degree of consciousness. The transition from an autocratic to a parliamentary regime is a social learning process, in which vehement conflicts and regressions frequently occur. The transition from an autocratic to a parliamentary regime is a difficult process. It usually took several generations before standards of parliamentary behaviour were generally accepted by the population. These two regimes each represent a different stage in the process of civilisation. In an autocratic regime, individuals structure their personality by attuning it primarily to ordering and obeying. By comparison, a parliamentary regime requires a more complex and more differentiated structure of personality with a more complex and higher degree of self-control. In contrast to autocratically ruled societies, in which lower-level conflicts are settled by force from above, and conflicts at the highest level of command are fought out behind the scenes, parliamentary regimes legitimise and limit conflicts between people. For broader knowledge of meeting behaviour in parliamentary-­ industrial societies from the nineteenth century onwards, we can rely on a lot of written and audio-visual sources as well as our own observations and experiences. Especially useful are the series of meeting manuals and textbooks that every parliamentary-industrial society has produced and can be considered as vehicles for the spread of meeting manners from the dominant groups to lower strata. These national series together form a long, continuous chain of information about desirable and actual meeting behaviour. The first provisional edition of the best-known meeting manual ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ appeared in the USA in 1876. By the end of the twentieth century, nine editions and more than 4,450,000 copies of the book had been sold. Before 1876 a few meeting manuals had been

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published sporadically, like the parliamentary manual written by L.S. Cushing in the USA in 1848 and several Dutch and English meeting guides in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, the continuous stream started around 1900 and has continued until today (van Vree 1999, chapter 8). The emergence and growth in the number of meeting manuals, textbooks and training courses show in itself that in parliamentary-industrial societies, learning how to participate in meetings has become an important part of the rearing and education of the young. Anyone who wants to participate in society with some degree of success needs to know and be able to apply elementary meeting rules and to have mastered the type of language spoken in meetings. In the development of the genre, two phases can be distinguished. The first phase comprised manuals covering the manners of national parliaments as models for political assemblies at lower levels, and for meetings of clubs and shareholders. By the mid-twentieth century, the second phase started with the rise of meeting textbooks focusing on workplace meetings as a model. Formalisation of meeting activities and manners had been the dominant trend as long as the power balances were relatively unequal and mutually expected self-control was relatively limited and insecure. But from the 1950s onwards, expanding networks of interdependence and its inherent equalisation or functional democratisation made life safer and more prosperous for many, while opportunities for rather poorly controlled emotional outbursts and threats diminished, the fear of conflicts lessened and the level of mutually anticipated self-control increased. These changes went hand in hand with spurts of informalisation in social steering codes, meeting manners included.

11.7 Informalisation of Meeting Manners in Parliamentary-Industrial Societies By the mid-twentieth century, the focus of the educative meeting literature switched from general deliberative assemblies to more differentiated, especially professional and business meetings; from formal rules to

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i­nformal codes; from debating to discussing; from majority decisions to consensus; from the attitude of parties, administration and opposition to the behaviour of individual meeting participants; and from a chairman’s function to the duties of ordinary meeting participants. In the last few decades, this trend continued by the publication of specialised manuals focusing on school, healthcare or industry meetings, on international meetings and meetings with people from culturally diverse backgrounds (van Vree 1999: 271–302). This shift reflects a more-embracing process of informalisation of manners, as characterised by Wouters (1990a): in their less unequal relationships, people began to be less threatened by those feelings and behaviours that had been loaded with anxiety and shame in earlier stages of social and psychological development in relation to tensions between social groups, classes and sects. The controlled expression of feelings of anger, disappointment and aggression was acceptable to a certain degree in meetings on the basis of an increase in reciprocally anticipated self-control. The informalisation of meeting manners can be substantiated by some quotes taken from several trend-setting, often reprinted and translated books on meeting manners from the USA and Western Europe. Together these books give a reliable impression of the second phase of an international genre of meeting manuals. A striking example of the shift from formal to informal meeting manners is: Robert’s rules of order. Such rules are necessary in some kinds of large groups assembled to make decisions or recommendations. And they are required in legally constituted meetings. But in small groups, the ponderous procedures involved stymie human interaction and the flow of creativity. The rules stimulate a legalistic and mechanical way of thinking. (Dunsing 1976–77: 29) It is no longer expected that the chairman mainly watches over and applies the procedures, but that he varies his leadership according to the type of meeting and knows how to control tensions and conflicts neutrally and smoothly, based on his own insight and feelings.

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Attention has shifted from chairman to participants. Everyone is considered to be responsible for good order and fair turn-distribution. With this shift, the way in which a point of order is raised has been ‘informalised’: You can help the chairman in the exercise of his duties. For instance, ‘I propose to first define the subject, before beginning to discuss it’, ‘That seems to be a misunderstanding. You probably mean …’, ‘In my view the question of Mr./Mrs. B has not been answered yet’. When you dash to the help of the chairman, you do not have to ask permission to speak…. (Rüdenauer 1982 (1980): 27) Modern meeting manuals attach more value to holding discussions and striving towards a consensus than to debating and voting: Debate is not discussion in the true sense, for there is no attitude of inquiry and reflective thinking about what is the best solution. The debater has made up his mind in advance, and he does all he can to advance and defend his point of view with no thought to being ‘won over’ by his opposition. (Zelko 1969 (1957): 233–234) Voting tends to crystallize opinion and harden positions: it emphasizes the majority and minority rather than the whole group. (…) This tends to emphasize a spirit of advocacy and contention rather than the spirit of reflective inquiry and open-mindedness that we strive for in a discussion. (Zelko 1969 (1957): 161–162) Debating and voting support and promote the formation of parties on the basis of belief, ideals or philosophies of life, and increase the chance of violent, hostile and aggressive feelings being expressed and the outbreak of arguments, which hinder an open and business-like discussion based on facts. In the altered attitude towards debating and voting, the expression of feelings and the starting of arguments comes down to the fact that the lessening of the power differences between the classes, sexes and generations made it necessary and possible for people to take into consideration more aspects of themselves and others in the discussions and decisions about the common future.

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A central question in meeting textbooks is how can someone submit his or her own opinion powerfully and purposefully without having this lead to violent conflicts and feelings of animosity? The manuals advocate a less anxious attitude with regard to conflicts than the older parliamentary ones. People should allow themselves and others more opportunity to express their feelings (carefully and differentially). Expression of emotions should not be taboo. Weeping, screaming and being angry are allowed in certain situations and on certain conditions. At least they should not give other participants a fright: Conflicts are nothing negative. They point to problems and challenge to think of creative changes. We can consider conflicts in society as safety valves. (Rüdenauer 1982 (1980): 77) In conclusion, it can be said that the changes in the meeting manual genre from a parliamentary-juridical approach to a psycho-sociological approach indicate a growing insecurity with regard to what belongs in a meeting and what does not. They echo a period of uncertainty when behaviour patterns were transmitted not only from above to below but also from below to above. “As the balance of power between people becomes more equal, they will raise their voice sooner against superior and inferior behaviours, thus expressing a risen ambivalence in their relationships as well as its acuity as a psychical problem” (Wouters 1990a: 51). The strongly increasing focus on emotions and their regulation was stimulated, at least partly, by these relational tensions and the tensions within oneself, between impulses and impulse-controls. While meeting varieties expanded and differentiated, codes of manners and emotion regulation (in meetings) became more informal, lenient and flexible. These changes were closely connected with a decline in the direct threat of war and the lesser risk of poverty, sickness and ignorance; the lessening power differences; and the decline of societal tensions and oppositions within states. As security, prosperity and social mobility rose, and more people were compelled to hold meetings, party-political and socio-economic contrasts lost much of their edge. The struggle towards revolutionary changes by advocates from lower classes of the population ebbed, and with it, established groups lost much of their anxiety about

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the people from these classes as well as for the behaviours and feelings that were associated with them. People from different classes, from both sexes, and from more varied ages, began to meet each other more often and more regularly and at higher-level meetings than previously. In these meetings, they could express their feelings more freely (within the limits fixed by the balance of power). It became less dangerous for one’s position and prestige to do so, and it was reciprocally expected that the necessary self-control would be employed and there would be no misbehaviour. As social tensions and ideological contrasts declined, the picture that meeting participants formed of each other became more ‘psychological’ and more ‘sociological’, in other words, more variegated and freer from brief emotions, and more tuned to the power and dependency relationships between people. After the incorporation or embodiment of parliamentary norms and rules in the social habitus of people, and with a further reduction in the risks of being conquered and humiliated, a more differentiated regulation of behaviours and emotions became possible and necessary.

11.8 Meeting Regimes and Self-Control Meetingisation is a central aspect of the civilising process, in which people learn to constrain each other towards greater and steadier regulation of their mutual relations, and thus also of their own emotions, by orientation to ever-longer, more permanent and more differentiated chains of action. Rules, procedures and habits that regulate human behaviour during meetings mainly emerged in order to constrain participants to retain self-­ control, even when tensions and emotions were running high. When the power differentials between the participants are mostly equal and no one can force others to behave in a certain way, mutually agreed, impersonal rules have to do it, albeit monitored by an elected chairperson. Thus, the more equality between participants, the more specified and agreed-on meeting rules and codes are necessary to keep discipline and order. A significant illustration can be found in the society of the Dogon people living in the central plateau region of Mali, in West Africa, south

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of the Niger bend. The Dogon were and are mainly agriculturalists with some traditional meeting customs dating back to a ‘tribal’ level of ­integration and a limited level of differentiation. For their meetings they build ‘togunas’, palaver huts with a very low roof, which forces participants to sit rather than stand. Togunas are used by the village elders to discuss problems of the community but can also serve as a place for customary law. They are mostly built on a 500-metre-high cliff stretching about 150 kilometres, and therefore from a toguna, one has a wide view of the landscape. The low roof of the togunas prevents meeting participants from standing up in order to fight when emotions are running high. Disputes have to be resolved through verbal battles only (Fig. 11.1). In Dogon society, elementary meeting rules are embodied in the architecture of the toguna. The toguna is the visual representation or embodiment of the pressure which the community as a whole exercises upon individuals to control their emotions and impulses. These instruments embody ‘the social constraint towards self-restraint’ (Elias 2012a).

Fig. 11.1  Togunas. Photographed by Jan Joost Peskens (2018)

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Citizens of contemporary parliamentary-industrial societies usually learn by acquiring the fundamental meeting rules, in the form of self-­ control, from an early age—as might even be the case with the ­contemporary Dogon. This means that the external, social pressure to control oneself according to prevalent codes is internalised and over time becomes a sort of second-nature reflex. The social pressure to ‘behave’ in meetings is gradually internalised by children and integrated into their habitus, ego, conscience or ‘psychic architecture’. Shame has taken the place of punishment and open humiliation. This process is part of what Norbert Elias refers to as a ‘civilising process’ (Elias 2012a: 4–5). Cas Wouters asserts that in the most recent phase of this process, as a relatively high level of self-restraint has come to be taken for granted and is therefore mutually expected, the rulings of conscience have become less rigid, less automatic, allowing for more conscious, more flexible and varied applications, resulting in a ‘third nature personality’. Meeting textbooks illustrate this trend. As people have become more ‘civilised’ (or grown older), they may feel instantly ashamed or embarrassed when others express emotions in a way they had often painfully learned to restrain in their childhood. Some authors of meeting textbooks encourage their readers to make use of this sensitivity and express certain feelings consciously and tactically in order to ‘attract attention and improve the quality of one’s meeting life’. Be a cantankerous participant. Squeak and chirp, complain or yell ‘bull’ until you shift the tide of things or until others stop and say, “OK loudmouth, we’ll take the time to look at what we’re doing here”. Cry. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman. Crying feels good when it’s genuine, and it might get you the attention you want. Fall out of the chair or fall asleep, or both (Dunsing 1976–77: 103).

11.9 The Meetingisation of Work The informalisation of meeting manners coincided with a process that I call ‘the meetingisation of work’, which produced an upper class of professional chairpersons consisting of managers who do nearly nothing else than chairing and visiting meetings and developed exemplary, powerful

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models for employees and other citizens of parliamentary-industrial states (van Vree 2002, 2017). Since the 1960s, the number of meetings has grown immensely for employers and employees and citizens in general, although not for every one of them to the same extent. Particularly in professional life, more people were more frequently obliged to hold discussions with each other and to negotiate about the implementation, division and payment of functions, and the acquisition, management and spending of capital. In everyday social intercourse meetings acquired a central position. In all Western industrialised countries, company managers have begun to allocate more and more time for meetings. The higher the individual is in the hierarchy, the more the number of meetings.3 As far as meeting behaviour was concerned, competence and knowledge became essential ingredients for a successful career. Recent spurts in the globalisation of the economy and political integration have reinforced these processes. The emergence of bigger companies requires new facilities and organisational structures, involving a marked increase in conferences, conventions and congresses to talk and decide about the common future. This development went hand in hand with the emergence of an increasingly wider continuum of variants of meetings in public and private life. The meetingisation of work was a three-stage process, not equally strong and not fully concurrent in all parliamentary-industrial societies

 Research from the start of the 1960s amongst chief executives in the UK and the Netherlands indicates that members of boards, chief executives, and departmental heads of huge, large, and medium-sized concerns spend 30 to 50 per cent of their time in all sorts of meetings. During courses on meeting practices given by Wilbert van Vree in the last two decades, several hundred directors, primarily from private Dutch companies, were asked how much time they generally spent on meetings. According to their own reckonings, those managing companies of fewer than ten personnel spent at least 10 per cent of their time preparing, executing, and concluding meetings, whilst those managing organisations with more than 500 personnel spent up to 75 per cent (sometimes even more) of their working time on these activities. More figures and examples of the time managers spend in meetings can be found in The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science (Allen et al. 2015). 3

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(van Vree 2017; Ravn 2017). Until the 1960s the dominant meeting style in the workplace can be characterised as authoritarian-instructive. Since the 1960s we have seen the rise of a more democratic meeting style. This style relies heavily on democratic ideals and parliamentary manners. It is understandable that people relied on these manners first, because there were no other, more adequate manners available at the moment the meeting compulsion on the workplace came on stream. Moreover, the middle and lower classes had just internalised the most elementary parliamentary rules, under which the one man one vote and the majority rules, so for them these rules were self-evident at the time. Employees slowly found out that the parliamentary, democratic meeting culture was not wholly adequate in the workplace. Just like the psycho-­social meeting textbooks, the corresponding manners have often proved to be inadequate in many professional situations; they are geared to debates between parties, to the use of majority rule and other democratic conditions which do not fit—more hierarchical—work relations very well. With the growing awareness of this incongruity, a collective quest for a more adequate workplace meeting culture began and is still going on, resulting in the rise of a more informal, business-like meeting model next to the fundamental, more formal, parliamentary one.

11.10 Two Meeting Models In large parts of the contemporary, (post-)industrial world, the power balance between private companies and national states has shifted in favour of the first. Business-like meeting manners rapidly developed and have spread widely in the last two decades, while the significance of the meeting ideals and manners developed in and spread from national parliaments, political councils, committees and associations has decreased. Since the process of informalisation of meeting manners in politics and associations lagged behind that process in professional organisations, two different meeting models developed. The older, parliamentary, democratic habitus has partially come to be at odds with the demands of efficiency and the differences in function, position and expertise required both for face to face and for the rapidly increasing number of digital meetings that have widely spread via work.

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The meeting regime of actual parliamentary-industrial societies is characterised by two models competing for dominance. The first follows the fine-tuned and partly internalised rules and practices developed in national parliaments, local councils and associations. The second is more effectively adjusted to the requirements and possibilities of daily workplace conditions and related power balances. It embraces meeting styles that match more closely with work and other daily relationships than the collective-egalitarian style extracted from democratic meetings. This emergent model is more informal, more hierarchical, more customer and action oriented, more time and money conscious. These two models are from several angles abrasive and inter-­conflicting. Below I have listed some structural, strongly inter-conflicting, aspects of both models. Formal meeting style in politics, associations

Informal meeting style in business, professional life

• Participation in meetings on the basis of membership and election •  Final decisions by majority

• Participation in meetings on the basis of function and ability

•  Debating, discussing •  Impartial, technical chair •  Focus on laws and rules •  Formal procedures/rituals • Everybody must have their say

• Decisions by responsible person, leader, expert, consensus •  Informing, advising, problem solving •  Chair is executive, stakeholder •  Focus on actions (who will do what) •  Activating, customise procedures • Everybody can have their say on the basis of function or ability within a certain timeslot (time = money)

The coexistence of two partially inter-conflicting meeting models triggers ambiguous expectations and feelings and is a significant source of numerous meeting problems in the workplace as well as in politics and associations today. In professional life more varied types of meetings have been developed for every sort of problem. The emerging, more informal meeting model increasingly requires a habitus that makes greater demands on one’s own initiative and feeling of responsibility, as the above-­mentioned quotes from meeting books illustrate. Parliamentarylike meeting manners did not informalise to the same degree and at the same speed. In the process of meetingisation of work, they often proved

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to be inadequate in many professional situations. On the level of national parliaments in Europe, only relatively small changes in the direction of informalisation can be observed. For instance, as an expression of ­diminishing mutual fear, opportunities of interrupting speakers and of mutual discussions between members were augmented. Also, parliamen­ tary speech has come more in line with everyday language.4 In the perception of many people, the discrepancy or gap between the two meeting models is becoming ever greater. In their eyes, the procedures of parliaments, local councils or associations look a bit strange, laborious and incomprehensible, especially since they are used to the manners of more purposive and convenient, work meetings. From the end of the last century, in the USA and probably other Western countries too, active memberships in civic groups, fraternal organisations and other local associations declined more rapidly than ‘check-book’ memberships increased (Painter 2014). New members prefer to keep—long-winded—meetings at arm’s length.5 Judith Brett is probably correct when she writes that with the waning of the parliamentarisation of associational life parliaments, the product of an earlier civilisational wave is “left exposed to the criticism of citizens who now do their day-to-day and community politics in quite different ways. Where once parliament led the way establishing procedures and protocols that became the model for other assemblies, parliament is now being left behind, its rigid adversarial procedures deployed by our rigidly disciplined parties no longer according with the community’s experience of the processes necessary for good decision making” (Brett 2002: 156). The exemplary function of national parliaments has waned. The rise of the hybrid meeting regime of parliamentary-industrial societies is characteristic of integration processes lagging behind differentiation processes, a tendency which is conducive to greater social inequality.6

 I am investigating and comparing the codes of conduct and manners in the national parliaments of the EU these days. 5  In the Netherlands, even political parties tend to brush aside parliamentary meeting manners in their own organisations (Meeus 2018). 6  A fascinating, long-term comparative investigation by Bas van Bavel (2016) indicates that the dominance of less egalitarian meeting cultures in Western 4

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As the historian Yuval Noah Harari said, “We have a global ecology, a global economy and a global science—but we are still stuck with only national politics. To have effective politics we must either deglobalise the ecology, the economy or the march of science—or we must globalise our politics” (The Guardian, May 21, 2018). The globalisation of the economy and the risk of large-scale wars and ecological disasters should embolden individual states to discuss closer cooperation and implementation of policy. Indeed, the biggest tensions and problems of today seem hardly solvable without more representative and more adequately functioning assemblies at higher levels of integration. Norbert Elias emphasised that processes such as civilising processes are not planned, intended or foreseen by people, although they do presume intentions, plans and actions of people. The development of meeting activities is an aspect of the long-term process of social interweaving, which can clarify Elias’ statement that “the blind dynamics of people intertwining in their deeds and aims gradually leads towards greater scope for planned intervention into both the social and individual structures— intervention based on a growing knowledge of the unplanned dynamics of these structures” (Elias 2012a: 405). We do not know what is going to happen, but it is to be expected that when, in the long run, increasingly larger groups of people become more interdependent, meetingisation will also continue. However, the degree to which this process will be accompanied and interrupted by the threat or use of organised violence is conditional upon the speed, scale and impact of the further development of competition and inter-

societies might become long-lasting. On the basis of six historical case studies he concludes that an economy dominated by the market as an allocation system for land, labour, and capital always goes through a cycle of rise and decline. In the final phase, a small group of people becomes the holder of the resources, which results in an increasing wealth inequality. Thereupon the market elites start to translate their economic power into political power and influence, transforming the rules of the game and the rules of the market exchange to suit their interests. In the course of the cycle the significance of self-organisations with egalitarian meetings of ordinary people decreases slowly, with twists and turns, but ‘inevitably’.

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weaving processes, the motor of expanding meeting behaviour. And the other way around: the further civilising of people’s meeting manners and language is a condition for a firmer control of organised violence and the increase in safety, welfare and quality of life. Talking in a more detached way and making more adequate decisions about the common future of increasingly more complicated and more-embracing human figurations may help to prevent needless sorrow and suffering.

12 Informalisation, Sociological Theory and Social Diagnosis Richard Kilminster

12.1 Preface In the last 30 years or so books about the impact of the recent globalisation spurt on social relations, politics, culture, social selves and identity formation within Western nation-states have been legion, coming from both sociology and other sources such as journalism and social commentary. Also, in the social sciences, economic diagnoses of our time—though much narrower in scope—seem to have the upper hand in terms of influence (Stiglitz 2002; Martell 2010; Piketty 2014). This chapter shows how the theory of informalisation can illuminate in a unique way the nature of those social, psychological and behavioural effects, something which can also potentially have a bearing on the adequacy of some of the strident condemnations of society often being made. At the same time, it can illuminate the shortcomings and distortions of the work of many of those social critics working from different traditions on the same problems. As Karl Mannheim said, when we embark upon social research, ‘[W]e drag along … intentional and unintentional misrepresentations—a false mythology. Sociology brushes these things aside with ease (Mannheim 1931: 160–161)’. © The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0_12

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Since the theory of informalisation has been expounded in Part One of this book, for my purposes only a brief summary is needed here. The well-documented waves of informalisation at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Roaring Twenties and the 1960s and 1970s arose out of a period of formalisation in which identification with the established had the character, in Freudian terms, of an automatic personality structure, via a strong super-ego formation. The society had clearer, hierarchical social boundaries which were transformed as interdependent groups that became more integrated. The theory as a whole works with a model of phases,1 each leading into the next, and, most importantly, it has been empirically established with extensive comparative evidence organic to the theory, as Part One of this book amply demonstrates. The developing social structure as a whole contained a tension-balance between strata, which prompted a process of dehierarchisation and differentiation and an opening up of social and psychic dividing lines, which loosened up the stern and inexorable self-controls typical of the previous phase. This is the aspect of the theory I wish to emphasise, that is, the loosening of psychic constraints or, put another way, repressed feelings and drives becoming gradually admitted into consciousness. Hard fought for changes in sexual and other behavioural codes in the 1960s and 1970s stabilised around a more ego-dominated mode of self-regulation which gradually resulted in a more flexible, malleable pattern of individual self-­ control. In other words, in the social compulsions experienced today, a type of person best thrives who has an extended capacity for adjusting to society’s various demands, which has provided the psychological preconditions for a new cultural sensibility.2

 In Kilminster 1998, chapter 8, I have presented a sociology of sociology through a model of three phases (Monopoly, Conflict and Concentration) in the development of sociology since 1945. I demonstrated how the nature of changes in sociological theory over that period can be best understood as developing in parallel with phases of an informalisation process (Wouters 1986) as well as connected to the concomitant institutionalisation of sociology (Shils 1982). 2  Interestingly, these are precisely the kinds of people about whom various commentators (e.g., Christopher Lasch 1980, discussed at length in Kilminster 2008) have lamented as reinforcing cynicism and a selfish attitude towards life. 1

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My argument is that these social and psychological changes, as part processes, have made possible many of the social and behavioural trends within nation-states arising out of globalisation, which many writers have sensed and speculated about. However, in their zeal to blame governments and assail political rivals, many social critics have failed fully to grasp that during significant longer-term socio-psychological transformations people themselves are changed, an insight central to the theory of informalisation. Any social diagnosis3 will be weakened if outdated assumptions are being made about the socio-psychological nature of people and their relations with each other, when those assumptions have in fact been shown to have been superseded by the social process itself. Also, many writers have allowed their moral and political convictions, often coupled with hunches and hearsay, to dominate their assessment of society’s problems, ills or malaise arising partly from the realities of globalisation.

Critics arguing this way have misjudged the nature of what can be observed, probably applying moral standards corresponding to the sensibility of an earlier phase when a more super-ego-dominated form of emotion management prevailed. This is where the theory of informalisation is helpful because it illuminates the limits of the judgemental criteria being employed in cases such as this. Only when one knows about these kinds of things and has much more relevant sociological evidence, can one take a position on what is desirable or undesirable about emerging social relations and behavioural codes. 3  The term ‘social diagnosis’ referred to in this chapter is not synonymous with the sense first established as a technique in social casework and elaborated by Mary Ellen Richmond in her classic study (Richmond 1917). Rather, I acknowledge the explanatory usefulness of the medical analogy and take the task of social diagnosis to be discerning sociologically not only what are, but also what are perceived to be, the problems or social ‘ills’ of society (see Mannheim 1943). In some parts of this chapter my approach shades over into socioanalysis, a term I have applied to a kind of historical sociological psychology found in the work of Norbert Elias. From the perspective of today, in the process of recovering certain forgotten past experiences, the researcher has to face the presence of the past in themselves in ways that can be challenging and far from comfortable. I discuss this at length in Kilminster (2007: 93–100). The term socioanalysis was first used in a slightly different sense by Karl Mannheim (cited in Kettler and Meja 1995: 82).

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12.2 Sociology, Para-sociology and Informalisation In earlier research (Kilminster 2014/1982, 1998) I coined the term ‘para-­ sociology’ for a type of sociology-like enquiry which is often inventive and learned but exists on the periphery of the discipline. It contains philosophically inflected forms of abstraction and is to be found, for example, in the works of Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and various forms of discourse analysis and semiology (Kilminster 1998, chapter 5). I also showed the presence of this kind of work in a range of social philosophising, futurology and theories of the catalytic function of utopias in societies (Kilminster 2014/1982). In terms of output and public prominence, in the present period leading the field on the effects of globalisation on social life have been writers, literary critics, journalists, commentators, social philosophers and social theorists, far too numerous to cite, whose work can also take its place within the category of ‘para-sociology’. This kind of speculation makes use of sociological (as well as economic and sometimes psychoanalytic) concepts and evidence in an ad hoc fashion, usually to back up prior moral or political evaluations of the situation.4 Sociologists have been more systematic and have developed or built upon theories including ‘late modernity’ (Giddens), ‘post-modernity’ (Maffesoli), ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman), ‘reflexive modernization’ (Giddens), ‘risk society’ (Beck) and ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash and Urry). I will be referring to these writers and others in what follows. These are attempts to specify the structural and institutional processes—  To give some idea of the genre I have in mind, many of these books use at the start of their title the imposing phrase, ‘The Age of ’, with the moral, ideological or otherwise evaluative message that the author is trying to get across, suggested in the subtitle. Here is a selection of subtitles of several relevant recent books (minus their authors’ names) which use this device to organise social criticism around one provocative idea. The following are real titles: ‘The Age of ’ … Uncertainty, Fluidity, Anxiety, Inequality, Bewilderment, Greed, Despair, Crisis, Paranoia, Selfishness, Turbulence, Deception and American Unreason. Another much used formula is ‘The Culture of ’. Hence, recent subtitles added include Narcissism, Lies, Fear, War and Nothing. 4

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largely using variations of the concepts of modernity and modernisation—that have led to the particular character and problems of the increasingly globalised society in which we now live. However, some of this work—notably by writers on the borderline with social philosophy—shades over into the critique-prescription mode typical of para-­ sociology. It does not take much perspicacity to realise that globalisation is likely to be experienced as unsettling, but what form that feeling takes has to be sociologically investigated. One of the drawbacks of social criticism which carries its heart on its sleeve is that assumptions are made on the basis of what people must or should feel given the nature of globalised social processes and events of which the author does not morally approve. For example, disapproval is implicitly and sometimes explicitly heaped upon consumerism and social media, which are said to be part of the fast-moving, digital life of fleeting encounters and hollow commitments typical of our age that are apparently causing such anguish and misery for many people. Systematic empirical research, even if undertaken, is fashioned beforehand towards producing results which miraculously confirm the author’s worldview. Or the disconfirming aspects of research results are avoided by illustrating an evaluative conviction by simply selecting examples which confirm it. The magical-mythical residues in this kind of thinking are rarely recognised for what they are. A common social-diagnostic process goes like this: assume what is ‘obviously’ making people unhappy or discontented; locate a nexus of economic power, or other groups to blame; and then make suggestions for policies or social changes to remedy the situation on that basis, which should make people happier and more contented. However, the prior empirical question we should be asking is ‘what are the discontents in society?’ They cannot be assumed. Is the problem wages or submission to authority? Why is sexual repression apparently not a source of frustration and anguish anymore? Whether you approve of it or not, the loosening of sexual taboos has occurred in a series of waves as part of interlocking unintended social processes since the nineteenth century. People appear to have successfully accustomed themselves to the results of this unplanned process—not without considerable conflicts and tensions of course— which was brought about partly by functional democratisation. It has

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resulted in monumental changes of attitude, sensibility and behaviour in this area even within living memory. To repeat: during significant ­longer-­term socio-psychological transformations, people themselves are changed, a process which can be investigated empirically. Adopting a longer-term approach not only enables us to see that but also means we have to be prepared to face empirical results with which we disagree, find unpleasant or of which we otherwise disapprove. Once the fantasy of an end to social antagonisms has been jettisoned (the collapse of communism in 1989 has accelerated this realisation), then sociologists have to face that there are basic social relations which humans must enter into in order to live and survive, as a matter of biological inevitability. If this understanding is not a significant (although not entire) part of our inquiries, then it is not possible to pose the real problems of life in an interdependent society in a comprehensive way. It is crucial for discerning what can, cannot and should not be changed (see Kilminster 1998: 184, footnote 8). Working towards creating a society of greater opportunities for human fulfilment must be based on an assessment of what the dissatisfactions really are. The theory of informalisation is well placed to help here. The status and strength of the empirical evidence involved in the para-­ sociological diagnoses is a serious issue. The illustrative examples provided in this kind of work do add a modicum of social fibre to what are otherwise unanchored rhetorical assumptions about the fears and uncertainties which people may be (or ‘must’ be) feeling. But it is an insubstantial reinforcement. Some studies operate with a transcendentally derived moral-political worldview for which only selective, corroborative evidence is required since the vision of human potentialities presupposed is held to be ethically indubitable and not subject to empirical refutation. A feature of this kind of enquiry is that unchecked by evidence organic to the theory as part of a regime of theory testing, it pulls its practitioners towards metaphorical extravagance and overstatement as the only means of persuading others of the cogency and power of its discursive evaluation of society. A good example is the later writings of Zygmunt Bauman. From a selective reading of recent studies across all the genres about trends and problems in contemporary society in the light of globalisa-

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tion, three recurring conclusions or hypotheses can be distinguished. It is often claimed that: 1. People are becoming generally more flexible, casual and ‘reflexive’. They appear to be able to adopt different part-identities and have a capacity to switch rapidly between different social situations and relations. 2. Individuals no longer possess a continuous, core essential self, but are capable of becoming anything they need to, because they can ‘choose’ to be constructed by diverse identity discourses at will as they move in and out of various communities and groupings in a fast-moving society. 3. Close relationships are becoming more instrumental and no longer unconditional and lifelong. The bargaining ethos has been transferred into intimate relationships in which people take what they want from them in exchange for giving what they are prepared to give. In the recent sociological literature, as such, there has been a trend towards developing more precise formulations of the impact of globalisation on the self and on individual and collective identities. This sharper focus on the socio-psychological dimension often goes hand in hand with sweeping moral condemnations of society as fostering hollow, transitory relationships, fear, anxiety and emptiness. However, it does bring to the fore (albeit over-abstractly) the actual psychic realities of the people whose feeling states have been merely assumed in some diagnoses. The widely expressed hunch that in the present period older certainties cannot any longer be relied upon is likely to contain a grain of accuracy. The question is which kinds of certainties are becoming outdated? Which are not? It is sometimes said that people today are more frequently asking these: Who am I? Who are we? Is there any more to me than the self I have to construct or project? But the question is how far are people in reality actually burdened with pathological ego-centredness, narcissism or feelings of emptiness? (see Kilminster 2008). One message of many recent commentators does seem to ring true, though, which is that we are living through a time when the well-­ established central institutional presence of vigorous nineteenth-century individualism (economic, political, legal) associated with the modern

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world has been supplemented by what could be called hyper-­individualism. The experience apparently generating this sensibility has been summed up by Gubrium and Holstein who speculate that: Coherence and constancy, it seems, don’t amount to much any more in a postmodern world of instantaneous communication, hyperkinetic consumerism, and electronically mediated imagery. In such a world, the self is everywhere and thus nowhere in particular—fleeting, evanescent, a mere shadow of what it used to be. (2001: 3) To use Elias’s (2010b/1991) concept, evidence from various quarters does suggest that the ‘We/I’ balance in general in contemporary society has become much more tilted towards the ‘I’ than in the phase before. The question is, though, what conclusions should one draw from this? This trend plausibly bears the marks of a particular phase of informalisation during which a more ego-dominated mode of self-regulation has gradually resulted in a more flexible, malleable pattern of individual self-­ control. This could mean that the interpretation of contemporary trends as producing fearful, ego-centred emptiness, anxiety and an unacceptable level of general selfishness was a judgement produced by a generation who had a different inner psychic balance dominated by a strong super-­ ego. It is highly plausible that contemporary social developments have fostered a new kind of person whose inner self-management is such that they are able to live with greater individual and interpersonal demands and behavioural intricacy than before as interdependency chains become longer and the links more complex as a result of globalisation and other part processes. In the following sections I will discuss a selection of key writers from three representative perspectives (philosophical anthropology, modernisation theory and liquid Marxism) who have attempted to describe and explain some important features of the social and cultural impact of globalisation, including questions of self and identity. It will become clear that a social diagnosis can also be rendered vague and indistinct by metaphysical residues, static thinking, rationalism, latent individualism, utopian horizons and over-abstraction. Eliminating these vestiges is also part of my aim, consistent with the ‘post-philosophical’ perspective from

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which I am arguing (Kilminster 1998, 2007). Inevitably, this is a ­challenging pursuit which throws into question the scope and appropriateness of many of the diagnostic, prescriptive and evaluative judgements about society being widely made in the present period. Thus, in this chapter the two aspects—social and theoretical illumination—are jointly significant, the positive outcome of which is to contribute to the self-­ clarification of all the research participants and thus to the clarification of the situation as a whole. Hence, it would be a grave misunderstanding to construe the following sections simply as a destructive critical exercise in the name of an assumed truth. The works of these researchers are not entirely false, but rather they are partial, one-sided perspectives on a social condition which we all share. One might say that what is untrue participates in the making of what is true.

12.3 ( 1) Neo-tribes: The Decline of Individualism? Michel Maffesoli’s celebrated book The Time of the Tribes (1995) is an allusive and learned piece of philosophical anthropology but is rather eccentric and often imprecise. But what makes this work interesting is that it runs against the conventional wisdom that the globalised consumer society is becoming hyper-individualistic. On the contrary, we are witnessing, he says, an ecstatic flight from the self, that is, from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’ of sociality: people are coming together in ‘neo-tribes’ as part of a general process of ‘disindividuation’ (ibid: 6). He argued this at the beginning of the development of the post-modern attitude in intellectual circles, accepting the view that the modernist world of production and disenchantment and the ideas of progress, work ethic, faith in scientific rationality, individualism, abstract political institutions that went along with it was exhausted. He argues that we are now seeing the rise of reenchantment and emotional renewal amidst the world of consumption and ‘alienated’ politics, which is reflected in the development of what he variously calls ‘neo-­ tribes’, ‘affinity groupings’ or ‘micro groups’. Grouping together, he suggests, is a ‘strange compulsion’ (why strange?) of humans and an

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‘anthropological constant’ (ibid: 77). People move in and out of various lifestyle groups, occasional gatherings such as festivals and sports clubs celebrating being together, revelling in the passion of their togetherness. These forms of ‘collective effervescence’ (he uses Durkheim’s concept) have always existed, but recent social developments (not specified) have favoured their widespread revival as a reaction to the inhuman impersonality of modernity. Institutions are all about pouvoir (power) whilst the new wave represents puissance, the vital force of the people. But what exactly are ‘neo-tribes’? What they are not is sub-cultures, which are far more fixed than the loose, transient groupings Maffesoli has in mind (Bennett 1999). Nor are they the tribes studied by anthropologists. He explains that the idea of a tribe in this context is a ‘metaphor’ (Maffesoli 1995: 6). He mentions very few concrete examples, though, possibly because he does not want to be tied down to specific, fixed cases since he wants to highlight the importance of what he sees as the active general phenomenon of collective, ‘Dionysian’ emotional renewal which he regards as heroic and deeply human. People are rejecting the dehumanised politics of representative democracy in the name of human freedom. It is immediately obvious that the vexed problems of definition and empirical reference only arise because Maffesoli’s work is basically a form of ‘second-order’ philosophical analysis with a strong evaluative purpose. The examples he cites are used only as examples to illustrate a prior, transcendentally established philosophical position which, as such, is not amenable to empirical confirmation or refutation. Having said that, for the sake of clarification it is worth putting what examples he does provide together with additions provided by Rob Shields in his Foreword (Shields 1995) to the translation of The Time of the Tribes. These are a selection: bikers, travellers, occasional gatherings such as Glastonbury, sports clubs, office friends, coffee groups, user groups for state services, associations of hobbyists, fans at a sports event, single-issue pressure groups, golf clubs, cricket clubs, carnival committees. Absent are political parties or political institutions or indeed any institutions at all which are rational, systematic, organised and relatively fixed and ‘modernist’. As centralised, remote and abstract politics declines, he suggests, there is the return of communities, close groupings and generalised ‘groupism’, which ‘outlasts political change’ (ibid: 34). In ­contrast

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to institutions, the transient neo-tribes have weak internal discipline since people move in and out, but strong inclusion, that is, group solidarity as people celebrate ‘being together’. Above all, they are forms of ‘elective sociality’ (Maffesoli 1995: 76, my emphasis), thus an emblem of human freedom. Maffesoli’s theory is a classic example of ‘para-sociology’, a hybrid of concrete social reference and self-confirming philosophical abstractions. Interesting or seminal social and behavioural experiences and events (notably for Maffesoli’s generation les événements de mai in Paris in 1968 and the ‘expressive revolution’ of the 1960s) are tacitly interpreted through philosophical reasoning in the service of a moral/political worldview. The sociological dimension of his analysis is in the tradition of the theory of ‘mass society’ (the concept appears in the subtitle of his Tribes book), hence he focuses only on the mass of undifferentiated, atomised individuals and the ‘dehumanization’ of modern urban life but pays no attention whatsoever to those people in the round, as real, interdependent human beings with emotions. He interprets the familiar mass society model morally and with a strong evaluative inflection. He says that in the neo-tribal activity people are ‘keeping warm together … in the heart of the cold, inhuman metropolis’ (ibid: 42). More significantly, for all his rhetoric about free-flowing collective emotions as a ‘vital force’ (he cites Henri Bergson’s concept), Maffesoli avoids the issues of subjectivity, individuality and people’s internal emotional management, the crucial importance of which the theory of informalisation makes us aware. As Evans (1999: 233) has shown, Maffesoli is reliant upon a rather vague post-structuralist conception of identity as constructed by discourses: one of which is the imagined unity of the tribe. Essentially, he has no sociological theory of the origins of the intense modern experience of individuality on the lines of Elias as extended by the theory of informalisation. (We will see later that this hiatus is also to be found in the theory of reflexive modernisation and in the work of Zygmunt Bauman.) Maffesoli views individuals as constantly moving to and fro from ‘mass’ to ‘tribe’, being constructed and deconstructed in perpetuity by this or that tribal or other discourse. From the point of view of the theory of informalisation, the specific people upon whom Maffesoli is implicitly basing his generalisations and

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prescriptions are those living through an empirically demonstrable phase of reformalisation. These are people who have embraced an emergent psychic balance of functions which enables them to bring to the surface and manage repressed emotions which, in former phases, when steeper hierarchies and greater social distance prevailed, prevented people from doing so. The relentlessness of the constructivist criticisms of a fixed personal identity probably performs an important function for people of this sensibility. Things are becoming problematic for those whose life situation has presented them with challenges and problems which they must solve to survive and thrive. My point is that this picture of the developing social structure is closer to the actual shape of that development and has been empirically established. Approaches such as that of Maffesoli stand theoretically in a place several steps removed from the interconnectedness of the social reality of which they are nevertheless a part. He makes intuitive assumptions about the nature of people based on wishful thinking and a prior moral and political worldview, citing no hard evidence at all for the putative increased growth of ‘neo-tribes’ in recent times. From his perspective he does not have to do that. There is also an implicit dialogue with the secular Marx (and various Parisian Marxists, including Guy Debord and Henri Lefevbre) running through Maffesoli’s work (Evans 1999: 240) which draws him towards religious and theistic affirmations. For Maffesoli, the masses are like a swarm of bees and the Marxian idea of the proletariat coming to consciousness as a class ‘for-itself ’ assumes a kind of logic of collective identity and goal which is conceived far too rationally and precisely. He argues that the proletariat can never be the subject of history because tribes crystallise out of the masses and they are inherently mobile and unstable since people freely move from one to the other. He suggests that because the process comprises individual choices, this free-flowing tribal cycle has been misunderstood as being purely individualistic, even narcissistic. On the other hand, it is in fact, he says, energised by the force of ‘collective effervescence’—the human compulsion for coming together in groups. He predicts that as the era of individualism comes to a close, ‘we will be confronted with … the “civil religion” advocated by Rousseau’ (ibid: 40). Maffesoli draws from Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life the idea that through collective rituals people dip themselves into the

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force of society which is at the same time God transfigured. He describes the colossal social phenomenon of ‘neo-tribes’ as the ‘social divine’. In other words, tribalism is based on the timeless spirit of religion. It is clear that in his critique of what he sees as an overblown and exhausted individualism, Maffesoli has overreacted the other way (as have a number of writers influenced by structuralism; see Kilminster 1998: 71–73) and finds benign communal practices everywhere and rejoices in their humanity. There is a sharp individual/society dualism at the heart of Maffesoli’s work. It is crying out for the conception of a ‘We/I’ balance which we find in the work of Norbert Elias (2010b/1991: Part III), which would enable an understanding of why there are more and less enduring collective identifications and an appreciation of the trend towards wider ones (Swaan 1995). The older view of politics, Maffesoli continues, wanted to ‘act on the social’, whereas we are entering a ‘transpolitical’ phase in which one just takes from society what one wants and enjoys its well-being: ‘politics becomes the ethical practice of life, not the pursuit of universal ethics’ (quoted in Evans 1999: 241, emphases in original). This statement is suggestive because Maffesoli has at least raised the question of the usefulness of pursuing universal ethical principles, something rarely considered outside the tradition of the sociology of knowledge. Whilst intriguing this statement is still rather vague, something picked up by various critics, including Bauman (1995: 187) and Derrida (cited in Evans 1999: 240–241) who have construed the theory of neo-tribes ominously. The fact that the membership of neo-tribes (unlike traditional, ascriptive tribes) is self-chosen by its individual members makes the tribes inherently precarious, unpredictable and a possible source of anxiety and fear of danger, rather than affirmation. Experience shows, so the argument runs, that they can have a tendency towards aggression and intolerance and hostility towards others (Bauman 1995: 187). Indeed, Derrida warned of the dangers of ‘orgiastic sociality’ and ‘demonic rapture … removal of responsibility’ (ibid), echoing Gustav Le Bon and other later studies of crowds. However, responses of this kind still uncritically take Maffesoli at face value. This surrender inevitably leaves uncorrected the basic distortions, flaws and archaisms which are present in his hybrid schema from the outset, a feature which leaves the problem of the

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sociogenesis and psychogenesis of individuality unaddressed and the empirical question fudged. Let us now turn to a different approach to the understanding of contemporary society and its problems: the theory of reflexive modernisation.

12.4 ( 2) Reflexive Modernisation as Political Conceit This section represents a change of register from Maffesoli’s philosophical approach to social diagnosis. Here I will be discussing later adaptations of orthodox Anglo-American sociological theory and research produced by a group of writers (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Peter Wagner) who have converged around a similar theme, epitomised by the concepts of ‘risk society’, ‘reflexive modernization’ and ‘reflexivity’. They are of course building on the venerable concept of modernisation, a conception developed in the 1950s and 1960s when American structural functionalism as a general theory of society had a virtual monopoly in Anglo-American sociology (Kilminster 1998: 154). It was a period of American economic, military and cultural domination of Europe, as well as of the superpower confrontation of the Cold War. From the point of view of the theory of informalisation, structural functionalism and modernisation theory probably felt comfortable at that time because they seemed to articulate very closely the level of behavioural formality, formal self-regulation and social distance which the theorists themselves, as participants in that society, were routinely required to embrace through a strong super-ego formation (Kilminster 2004: 39). Schematically, the main assumptions attached to the structural process of modernisation were the decline of traditional society and the acceptability of innovation and change; social structures were differentiated and flexible; modernising penetrated a wide range of roles and institutions, and embraced the increasing application of science. It is not too inaccurate to say that modernisation was always about the overcoming of traditional values and motivations hostile to change and economic growth. Alexander (1996: 136) has pointed that theoretical develop-

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ments in the symbolic patterning of social action have rendered the ­tradition/modern dualism obsolete, but this is carried forward by Giddens and others uncritically from modernisation theory of the 1950s and plays a central role in his theory. The new concept of ‘reflexive modernization’ developed in recent years by Giddens and others captures the idea that modernisation has entered a new stage of ‘high’ or ‘late’ or ‘second’ modernity or ‘disorganised’ modernity which is said to be a developed stage of modernisation, not a condition called post-modernity. It is worth noting that reflexive modernisation theory, like the work of Bauman, is very vague about the periodisation of the posited stages. It does not contain a systematic model of modernising stages which grow out of features and problems transmitted by the previous stages, each of which has, at the same time, characteristics of its own determined by structural tensions within the society as a whole. Be that as it may, according to the theory people today are compelled to become less respectful of structures, rules and customs which are rapidly changing, and in relation to which they are forced to become more reflexive and active in their life choices and identities. This perspective, as well as the concept of ‘reflexivity’ of Giddens, bears the marks of a particular phase of informalisation during which a more ego-dominated mode of self-regulation gradually results in a more flexible, malleable pattern of individual self-control, a whole dimension untheorised in the theory of reflexive modernisation. As we shall see, writers in this theoretical grouping tend to polarise the two kinds of modernisation, disregard psychogenesis and politicise the issues. For example, Scott Lash (1994: 113) says that, ‘if simple modernization means subjugation, then reflexive modernization involves the empowerment of subjects’. Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) posits that industrial society continues to involve risks (ecological, pollution, etc.), but they are now forced upon all of us as debatable public issues. Society now compels all people reflexively to confront irresponsible consequences of an action which crosses national, ethnic and class barriers. The whole structure has an imperative which compels new collective solutions. There are no non-­ participants. For example, we should not always rely on science and governments, but people themselves can generate knowledge of, say,

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ecological risk, with the founding of Greenpeace as the obvious example. Giddens (1991: 149–150) has a similar idea that a feature of reflexive modernisation is ‘institutional reflexivity’, whereby institutions incorporate knowledge of their social and market environment and transform themselves and their environment as the institution moves forward. There is in this perspective an emphasis on the central role of structural, situational compulsion forcing people more and more into solving problems with individual solutions in ad hoc and sometimes creative ways. Beck (1992: 135, 1994: 13) employs the concept of individualisation not in the sense of atomisation or loneliness but to describe what people are now compelled to do when tradition, community, family and ideology are all fading as certainties as a result of globalisation. For example, status-based marriage rules dominated as the relations between men and women were tilted more in favour of men, which forced people into togetherness. The movement towards two-career families means two individual biographies in education, job, career, which have to be pursued together within the nuclear family. As the old norms change they ‘force every man and woman, both inside and outside marriage, to operate and persist as individual agent and designer of his or her own biography’ (Beck 1994: 15, my emphasis), which has the effect of breaking up togetherness. The old-style socially prescribed, customary and expected biographies of the conventional life course have become transformed into the imperative to create a biography that is ‘self-produced and continues to be produced’. People now have the capacity to ‘cobble together their own biographies’ (Beck 1994: 135). As I said earlier, we still need to explain sociologically the shift in the nature of people’s internal psychic balance towards a more flexible, malleable pattern of individual self-control which enables people to be able to show such ingenuity. Beck’s idea that the new demands that are forcing marital adjustments are ‘breaking up togetherness’ strays into the evaluative and moral domain. The implication is that these are reluctant and desperate moves by people to cope with a ‘runaway world’ (I am using the title of Giddens’s Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1999) in which people’s quality of life is held to be self-evidently highly likely to be changing for the worse. Togetherness in relationships might not be breaking up, however, but simply moving on a higher structural-level consonant with

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the enabling characteristics of what Wouters has called the ‘third nature’ personality (Wouters 1998b; see also Kilminster 2007: 126–127), ­something not addressed in that form by any of the reflexive modernisation theorists. Why, in the theory of reflexive modernisation, is there no conception of psychogenesis going hand in hand with sociogenesis that we find in the theory of informalisation? Why is no attention paid to the internal pattern of self-control and capacity for emotion management of the people who are said to be adopting various identities with apparent ease? What kind of internal emotional management, what capacity for all-round and nuanced self-restraint would be necessary? It is because the whole issue is ruled out in advance by the nature of the kind of professionalised, Anglo-­ American sociology that the theory of reflexive modernisation represents. It embraced a perspective which methodologically excluded (i.e., suppressed) psychological realities and resisted any entanglement with depth psychologies of any kind (Kilminster 2004: 39). It was a stipulation which served the imperative of the developing profession of sociology to carve out analytically a field of enquiry separate from both economics and psychology and to claim ownership of it. Certain comments by Peter Wagner (1994: 170–171) are telling. Contrasting social identities under ‘organized modernity’ (which he calls the ‘golden’ age of capitalism) with those of the present period, he says that in the former era stable identities were grounded in material growth and ‘coherent and integrative social practices’. Whereas today’s ‘fluid identities’ can only be sustained in a context in which they are socially accepted. He argues that ‘Those who are able to do so, may now freely combine identities and switch them almost at will…’. Those who cannot do this suffer from anxieties and tend to seek refuge in strong religious or nationalist identities. There is a parallel here with Maffesoli’s conception of individuals who have no essence but are constructed by various discourses. Such people are tacitly assumed to lack something upon which the informalisation theory insists. That is, a dynamic, internal, layered, partly unconscious but self-managed, psychic structure which changes over time for reasons that are sociologically verifiable. For Wagner, the ‘ability’ to combine identities is dependent not on a social or group habitus but on ‘personality traits’ on the one hand and

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‘material possibility’ on the other. There is here an acknowledgement that people have a personality, but the concept is undeveloped and mentioned almost as an aside, which in a way it is, in this kind of sociology. His latent individualism is apparent: ‘Ability here is probably dependent on personality traits …’ and these are ‘unevenly distributed (ibid: 170)’. Ultimately, for Wagner the ability to self-steer via adopted identities is an individual gift. In the absence of any other explanation, this talent is presumably to be conceptualised as an inherited disposition or something innate. In this aspect of Wagner’s analysis there may be—consciously or unconsciously—perhaps a trace of Rational Choice Theory, or another one which makes comparable assumptions. Staying with issues of self and identity, I will now turn more directly to the work on reflexive modernisation by Anthony Giddens. He has coined the term ‘pure relationship’ (1991: 87–98) as an ‘ideal-type’ which he claims is a tendency characteristic of life in ‘high modernity’. It is of fundamental significance, he says, for the ‘reflexive project of the self ’. Drawing on the therapy literature, he says that this kind of relationship occurs primarily in sexuality, marriage and friendship. His basic proposition is similar to Beck’s idea that the movement towards two-career families has the effect of severing the character of the relationship from direct connection with economic life because there is not now always only one breadwinner. Mutual trust, therefore, becomes the central building block, and each partner tries to balance what each brings to the partnership with what each derives, a process which Giddens calls ‘effort bargaining’. The upshot is that relationships are said to become focused less on economic compulsion which forces togetherness on another basis and more on a central focus on intimacy. This takes over as the principal texture and force of the relationship. Partners seek the mutual satisfaction of psychic needs to a greater extent than before and which is likely to generate new forms of emotional strain deriving from intense interpersonal disclosure. Empirical objections have been levelled from a feminist perspective at Giddens’s model of the new close relationships (e.g., Jamieson 1999). There is interview evidence of considerable divergence from the equality of the pure relationship, with men still exercising more power over money

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and opting in and out of domestic work. The point is made that much negotiation goes on over what is fair in practical matters, but with the personal emotional sharing only as an aspect of the relationship. Couples are already tied into the wider society, not cut off from it. Although these objections seem strong because they are based on evidence, Giddens could legitimately reply that they miss the point because the notion of a pure relationship is an ideal-type, not a description of the reality itself. It is only possible to speak of a tendency towards the ‘pure’ case. Factual cases of the pure relationship will contain some of the features gathered together in the ideal-type but are always determined both by the nature of their empirical existence and the features of the unrealised type which limit and make that existence possible. In any case, Giddens’s model leaves out of account the level of internal emotional self-management presupposed in such close relationships, their extent being an empirical issue. In relation to the last point, the sociologist and group analyst Ian Craib (1994) noted problems arising from the image of humans that we find in Giddens’s work on the pure relationship. Craib’s outlook has affinities with the theory of informalisation because he invokes the unconscious in order to expose the voluntarism and rationalism of Giddens’s approach to the psychic economy of people which is, for all intents and purposes, a ‘black box’ in Giddens’s theory. Craib argues that the image assumes that people ‘freely choose’ to come together in a rational manner to solve practical problems or to enter close relationships. This image has obvious echoes in homo economicus and liberal ideology generally (see Kilminster 1998: 117–119). However, a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious different from that in Giddens provides a fuller conception of the people. It would suggest that individuals come together with other individuals because they seem to embody a solution to an inner problem that they have and vice versa. It is an aspect of human bonding reflected in a slightly different form in the clinical psychoanalytic conception of transference/counter-transference. Giddens suggests that if we do not achieve total emotional satisfaction in the pure relationship, then we simply move on, which again exhibits an implicit instrumentalist viewpoint. On the contrary, Craib argues, we

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need to start with the realistic assumption that we will experience being unhappy some of the time, because unhappiness in a relationship is inevitable, when, for example, one person feels ‘a sense of betrayal, possibly immense betrayal’ (ibid: 125) that the other person is not entirely what they thought they were. This need not be a signal to move on; rather it is potentially a phase in a maturing relationship. Craib argues that Giddens ‘assumes a coming together of isolated individuals’ but has no conception of deeper emotional attachments, and ‘the idea of effort bargaining … implies a fragile self ’ (ibid: 127,128), that is, people who get out of relationships to protect themselves from the challenges of deeper involvement. From the point of view of evidence, Giddens may well be quite sure that relationships are becoming more insecure, that people may be moving on if the relationship doesn’t meet their needs and so on. Like the recent work of Bauman, these kinds of studies rely on the reader recognising some aspect of their own or others’ lives which is then taken as evidence in favour of the theory. In essence, such theories rely on personal anecdotes. A basic confusion in Giddens’s scheme arises from his recasting of the Freudian unconscious as ‘practical consciousness’, that is, all the things people know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in social life but which they cannot directly describe. These rules and resources have a ‘virtual’ existence and are always available deep in the memory. They can inform repeated, structured action automatically over time, which contributes to social production and reproduction. This was a recasting of Freud significantly influenced by Erik Erikson and the ego psychology school (Kilminster 1998: 136; Lemert 1999: 195). Lemert rightly sees this revision as a failure on Giddens’s part to come to terms with Freud: Giddens’ unconscious is a reservoir of memory, a resource. Freud’s is the internal-Other, a force resistant to the conscious mind. Giddens cannot go so far as Freud for whom the unconscious was also the internal-Other of civilization itself, because going this far would wreck the theory of modern structures. If virtual structures exhibit their properties only in instances of practices and ‘memory traces’

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guiding an agent’s conduct, then social memory must be ‘for’, not ‘against’ modern consciousness. (Lemert 1999: 191) Furthermore, if a theory embodying the model of the knowledgeable agent described by Giddens is pursued exclusively, one pays a high price. It is an understanding of Freud which, when incorporated into a sociological theory, excludes an understanding of the role played in society by socially controlled and regulated instincts and drives, a reading that informs Elias’s work. Excluded from Giddens’s work is the study of social standards of affect control and individual self-control. Thus, alien to the theory of reflexive modernisation is the changing social regulation of pleasure, desire and aggression through shame, embarrassment and revulsion. These emotions and their regulation in behavioural codes have been systematically ruled out in advance as not a part of his research focus. Finally, the character of Giddens’s reflexive modernisation theory and concepts of self and identity merge seamlessly with what he calls his radical politics of ‘dialogic democracy’ in Beyond Left and Right (1994: 117ff). There he commits himself to a goal for welfare reform that is pure fantasy: that is, all people ‘living a happy life in harmony with others’ (Giddens 1994: 247). For his neo-utopian notion of welfare as ‘social pacts’ between groups, he wants to foster Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s obscure concept of the ‘autotelic self ’, that is, a person who can grow ‘beyond the limits of individuality’ (quoted on p.193). There is an almost dreamlike character to Giddens’s descriptions of this extraordinary individual who can supposedly ride disappointments, confront risks and turn tragedy and despair into an active challenge. His approach, by its very nature, leaves unexplained the psychogenesis of the kind of ‘reflexive’ people who are said to be adjusting and self-staging in the ways he describes, let alone capable of sustaining relationships of this kind. Giddens’s theory cannot provide insights into this realm in a realistic and systematic way because he has adopted a cleansed and anodyne concept of practical consciousness in place of Freud’s unconscious. This aspect of his work is in my view a politically driven conceit which minimises people’s inner struggles as humans as well as eliding the often intransigent and recalcitrant nature of social tensions, discords and conflicts.

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12.5 ( 3) Liquid Marxism: The Pyrrhic Victory of Metaphor over Evidence This section examines the later work of the renowned neo-Marxist sociologist and social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. The focus will be on his concept of ‘liquid modernity’ which he developed out of insights he shared with post-modernism in the wake of the fall of communism in 1989. In his recent ‘Liquid’ series of books (see Davis 2013), he addresses questions about contemporary society and its problems and attempts a social diagnosis. For my purposes I will initially draw attention to three basic features of his work which will illuminate my interpretation. First, reading any of Bauman’s books it becomes clear from page one that they are entirely politically engaged and evaluative from a particular point of view. The as-yet-unrealised communist utopia of social equality found in Karl Marx is present in Bauman both as an ideal and in a transformed guise as comprehensive identification with the deprived and underprivileged generally. It provides him with a warrant to make sweeping and highly negative judgements about virtually every aspect of contemporary society which are found wanting against these ideals and to express pessimism about society’s future. Ulrich Beck (1994: 53) has referred to the ‘pitch-black pessimism’ of some of Bauman’s works, for which he has been widely criticised (Bunting 2003; Davis 2011). This has been taken to a destructive point which I have elsewhere identified as an example of ‘overcritique’ (Kilminster 2013, 2017). Bauman’s passionate quest for the transcendental moral high ground for his critique took him to endorse as an ‘absolute’ Immanuel Levinas’s obscure ontology of human obligation.5 In all of Bauman’s work, the ‘emancipatory’ moral obligation or ‘critical’ spirit takes precedence over everything else.

 Bauman derives the transcendental argument about moral obligation for others from Knud Løgstrup and Emmanel Levinas. The metaphysics of Levinas, in particular, went beyond the idea of humans being merely ‘being-with-the-Other’ to posit a pre-social a priori of ‘being-for-the-­Other’ (Bauman 1993, 1998). The argument involves an ontological claim that our obligations to each other are a mode of being rooted in the human condition. The obligation is both uncondi5

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Second, the issue of the status and strength of the empirical evidence cited is a recurring issue in contemporary social diagnoses. By its very nature, Bauman’s transcendentally derived stance only requires selective corroborative evidence since it has been shown to be logically, philosophically indubitable. It is not part of a regime of theory testing. This provides him with a freedom to fall back on metaphorical extravagance and overstatement as a means of persuading others of the cogency of his observations. This is a prominent feature of his writings. Hence, we find in Bauman a flexible attitude towards empirical evidence, blending into his diagnoses at will hunches, hearsay, projections, exaggerations, fears, hopes, disapproval and overstatements. This is a passage from Liquid Life: Liquid Life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt such a life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast moving events, of being left behind, of over-looking ‘use by’ dates, of being saddled with possessions that are no longer desirable, of missing the moment that calls for a change of tack before crossing the point of no return. Liquid Life is a succession of new beginnings—yet precisely for that reason it is the swift and painless endings, without which new beginnings would be unthinkable, that tend to be its most challenging moments and most upsetting headaches. (Bauman 2005: 2) It is clear that these observations rely upon the reader recognising some aspect of their own or others’ lives which is then taken as evidence in favour of the theory. In essence, Bauman’s later works of social criticism rely on personal anecdotes. Third, another point to note is that Bauman’s dismissal of psychoanalysis (Bauman 1990: 101–102) and the lack of a systematic sociological psychology in his work have detrimental consequences (see Kilminster 2014, 2017). It inhibits a comprehensive, humanistic understanding of people in the round, of the kind we find in the work of Elias and in the

tional and unspoken. (For a sceptical view of Bauman’s turn to Levinas, see Kilminster and Varcoe 2002 and Kilminster 2013.)

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theory of informalisation. It is surprising that someone as sociologically astute as Bauman could have failed to grasp the sociological significance of Freud. As Hacker (1956: 110) succinctly put it: ‘It is one of Freud’s most original contributions that his … concept of the individual is at all times explicit sociology’. (In a late essay (Elias 2014b) Elias argued that Freud did not in fact go far enough in this direction.) Turning now to Bauman’s specific observations on the impact of globalisation on ways of life in contemporary society. His concept of ‘liquid modernity’, which plays a major role in his work, cannot be understood without taking account of his experience as an exiled Pole of the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the reunification of Germany. It is common knowledge that from out of these geopolitical realignments there emerged a new European and global formation of nations. Bauman was one of the first observers of the end of communism to see that it had produced a condition of ‘liminality’ in Eastern Europe (cited in Horváth 1998: 341). In this new, exhilarating but topsy-turvy world, post-modernism (which stimulated Bauman’s thinking for a while) flourished as time-honoured political allegiances were being rethought. It was a transitional situation in which old ways of thinking and doing things were in doubt. He participated in this process of reevaluation, taking up the post-modernist affirmation of difference, pluralism and tolerance against the totalitarian regimes which used Enlightenment-­ inspired scientific rationality to repress their populations, which led to the systematic, horrific extermination of minorities on a large scale as in the Holocaust. In this context, the traditional concept of modernity probably suited Bauman because hitherto people on the left of the political spectrum always thought that capitalism was to blame for society’s problems and socialism was the solution. But now this viewpoint could no longer be taken for granted with the collapse of the Soviet empire and its Marxian ideology and the discrediting of state socialism. The problems and social ills previously blamed on both of these two systems (capitalism and socialism) could now be seen to have been generated by modernity, the assumptions of which underpinned both. Modernity is in fact to blame. This slippery concept—which everyone could endorse in one form or

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another—gave Bauman and others room for manoeuvre at a time of fundamental reevaluation. All the bricks necessary for building the notion of ‘liquid modernity’, so prominent in Bauman’s later writings from 2000 onwards, were laid down in the aftermath of the momentous events of 1989 and inspired by the post-modernism it prompted. Bauman argues that the basic precondition of modernity was a solid time-space structure, a known, structured world and reliable reference points. He talks of the ‘de-temporalization of social space (1997: 86)’ in an emerging globalisation-driven society that now appears to be one where those certainties have gone; the world is no longer durable and solid, and the lack of reliable reference points is producing widespread anxiety. He makes the extraordinary claim that in the newly emerging post-communist world, ‘Identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume’ (ibid: 88). In sociology, he argues, we should now abandon the notion of society as an organic totality, with neat hierarchies. Rather all order is to be assumed to be a local, emergent, transitory phenomenon of incessant metabolism. The concept of society, he argues, should be replaced by sociality, community or class by habitat, socialisation by self-constitution and control by self-assembly. It is not too difficult to perceive that this tableau is an imaginative inversion of Parsons, whose scheme emerges as the epitome of the structured world of modernity now apparently superseded. It is also immediately obvious that there is no systematic periodisation here, no conception of structured transformation with phases. Just the simplistic idea that post-modernity somehow came after modernity. Marxian traces in Bauman’s thought define the problem of social orderedness, enabling him to perceive—at least to his own satisfaction—that consumerism has now gone well beyond simply being a mass diversion like football. It has become a very sophisticated, all-encompassing way of life. The new consumerism ensures the compliance of the masses (the seduced) in the reproduction of society in the interests of the powerful in a totalising fashion. Bauman understands the changing nature of social control solely as the various ways in which people are kept in line by rulers (surveillance, CCTV, databases, policing). This leaves out of account that people’s inner psychic economy is changing too, which is a significant flaw in his approach. It exposes his reliance on an essentially reductionist Marxian

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model of production/consumption as the touchstone of an understanding of society as a whole. This is applied in a ‘top-down’ analysis which preserves the classical notion of the ‘false consciousness’ of the masses in a new guise. For Bauman, ‘liquid modernity’ is said to refer to a society which is network-like, less condensed and systemic (Bauman 2000: 25) and above all it is a society totally pervaded by consumerism. His ‘Liquid’ series of books claim that all of economic life, politics, every location in society, even intimate relations are now saturated with an insatiable consumer desire. Jacobsen and Hansen (2017: 117) have succinctly shown that for Bauman: The only thing that counts is access to consumption. People no longer require identification or crave solidarity through their role in the productive system. They rather seek it in the role as fully-fledged (rather than flawed) consumers. They demand instant gratification, maximal impact and immediate obsolescence. The obvious objection to sweeping and undiscriminating judgements of this kind is to ask these: do consumers actually in reality demand those rewards? In that form? For all commodities? Immediately these questions are asked, the insubstantiality and generality of Bauman’s thesis begins to reveal itself. Essentially, he has identified the huge expansion of consumerism and concluded that its principles have come to pervade every nook and corner of the entire society, as traditional production has declined. He then uses this assumption to mount a swingeing critique of it in the name of an implicit socialist alternative that would reinstate labour and productive location as the centre of identity formation. No strong evidence is cited to substantiate these kinds of statements nor needs to be in Bauman’s scheme of things because his basic worldview has been transcendentally justified as absolute and is therefore refractory to evidential refutation. When Bauman writes that the need now in a society of accelerated change not to embrace an identity ‘too tightly, in order to be able to abandon it at short notice if need be (Bauman 1997: 191)’, it appears that he has endorsed a post-modernist view of identity. Looking more

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closely, we can see that because of his basically Marxian labour process approach Bauman (in a similar fashion to Richard Sennett (1999)) is only talking about occupational identity here. But what about other identities? Gender, significant other, family, region, religion, nationality, ­ethnicity? These cannot be shed like changing costume. Bauman does not consider that the reason that there is now little need to control the lives of seemingly pleasure pursuing consumers may be because, as the theory of informalisation tells us, people today are different psychologically. People with a more ego-dominated mode of self-regulation would have a more malleable pattern of individual self-control and hence can be more flexible in their relations with others. Arguably this would enable them to ‘conform’ to social rules and codes of behaviour more flexibly and not to require much external pressure or threat to do so. And they would also be able to handle human relations more flexibly in other contexts as well, including relationships said by Bauman to be saturated in the pervasive, all-embracing consumerist ethos. Finally, on the other hand, Bauman does seem to have accepted the concept of self-assembly in the post-modern canon. This issue is worth some reflection because it goes to the heart of his ironically voluntaristic and rationalistic assumptions about people. The individual ‘agent’ is said to be engaged in the incessant activity of self-assembly in a society in a state of permanent change but to no visible end and without progression or development. The absurdity of this idea is apparent. Societies are changing all the time and only diehard Marxists ever said there was a teleological classless end to history. Furthermore, continuity of memory alone refutes the idea of permanent self-assembly. No one could function without some kind of relative psychological fixity. Furthermore, the well-­ established concept of ‘identification’ in psychoanalysis (absent in Bauman) refers to the process whereby people assimilate aspects of another person into themselves, so identity is constituted by a series of identifications, something which is unconscious and compelling (see Holt 1950). All the self-assembly and reflexivity (its extent would need to be established empirically) which Bauman talks about is being carried out by adults who were once children. The changing psychic make-up of these people changes along with social developments, but it is of no interest to

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him, so he never addresses the issue of self-management. To the extent that ‘self-assembly’ is occurring, it would only be possible if there is a robust and nuanced mode of self-regulation and related behavioural codes in place. This might explain why less overt external repression is apparently needed to achieve social orderedness in the present period. As the theory of informalisation shows, a newly emergent level of social and psychic integration and social interdependency has enabled a higher level of mutual identification between people, so they must take aspects of others and of themselves more into account. Self-control and social control go hand in hand.

12.6 Concluding Remarks 1. It is remarkable how the three differing perspectives had much in common in relation to the social phenomena they were trying to explain, but all suffered from a similar range of failings. All were trying to understand social aspects of the same sequence of history from the fall of the Soviet Union to the present day. In this period the impact of a globalisation spurt on social relations, politics, culture, social selves and identity formation within Western nation-states has been undeniable. Arguing from a ‘post-philosophical’, dynamic sociology of knowledge approach, I tried to make out a case for the dual explanatory power of the Elias/Wouters theory of informalisation. Properly applied, it can convincingly both illuminate the nature of those social and psychological effects and at the same time expose the shortcomings of the three representative perspectives. These include politicised overstatements, metaphysical residues, static thinking, rationalism, latent individualism, utopian horizons, overabstraction and a systematic lack of a conception of the unconscious. 2. Each of the three perspectives lacked a rounded sociological theory of people, for which Freud provides an obvious source. The theories read as remarkably thin as a result. Individuals are regarded as a ‘black box’ or as constructed by discourses or steered by their ‘practical consciousness’. The strident negative evaluation of Freud over the years in the social sciences (Popper, Eysenck, Gellner, Chomsky) contributed massively to this situation, so in the current climate it is difficult to make the case for

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integrating Freudian concepts into mainstream sociology. Today Freud is once again, wrongly in my view, being pilloried as ‘unscientific’ based on a narrowly conceived scientistic model of what a science should be. All three perspectives faithfully heeded the critics of Freud and excluded from their theoretical armoury an understanding of the role played in society by socially controlled and regulated instincts and drives. 3. In the case of Giddens, there was a Freudian connection, but it was via Erik Erikson’s focus on the ego’s conscious interests, a direction which led away from drive regulation (Hoffman 1982: 140) and thus away from the recurring corporeal truths of the human condition. If this understanding is not central to our inquiries, then it is not possible to pose the real problems of life in an interdependent society in a realistic and comprehensive way. This is a robustly realistic approach which makes the intrusion of political fantasies into the enquiry more difficult to sustain. None of the writers I discussed (including Giddens) showed a systematic understanding of the changing social regulation of pleasure, desire and aggression through shame, embarrassment and revulsion. These emotions and their regulation in behavioural codes have been ruled out in advance. As a result, the shift in the nature of people’s internal psychic economy towards a more flexible, malleable pattern of individual selfcontrol is a concept unavailable to them simply by default. Thus, they took for granted, or put down to external necessity, the development of a new level of self-management which was made possible by a more egodominated mode of self-regulation. The evidence is strong that it was this development which was a necessary condition enabling people to be able to show the behavioural ingenuity which many post-modernist writers saw simply as people adopting different identities at will, which was lauded generally as a ‘good thing’. 4. It is also revealing that all three differing perspectives took for granted the orthodox concepts of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ and carried forward unreflectedly a number of its quite debilitating flaws, one of which was a vague notion of periodisation. The boundary between ‘modernity’ and ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity was indefinite and fudged. Moreover, there was no proper theory of a developmental process involving stages or phases, one leading into the next. Another fallacy taken forward was the idea that the discipline of sociology has as its main object

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of reference modern, advanced, industrial societies which supplanted traditional society. Peter Wagner (1994: ix) naively asks, for example: ‘What else is sociology, if not the systematic attempt to come to an understanding of modern society?’ What else indeed! A promising alternative is what Elias evokes as a historical sociology of the human condition, of mankind in the plural, in which every period of history and kind of human association is equally relevant to us. This viewpoint runs counter to the conventional disciplinary division of labour in research priorities built into the academic establishments in the social sciences, in which allocations most sociologists uncritically acquiesce. 5. The studies I discussed are all examples of ‘hodiecentrism’, as Johan Goudsblom has put it (quoted in Mennell 1992: 22), meaning they were today-centred. Keeping the door open in research to the very distant past can help modern people, including sociologists, to resist the temptation to demean past societies, including those that we call the Middle Ages, as implicitly ‘inferior’. Elias’s On the Process of Civilization was partly intended to facilitate readers to face their own latent feelings of superiority over ‘uncivilized’ peoples and outsiders generally. This aim cannot be so successfully achieved by a sociology that investigates only ‘modern’ societies because such approaches already tacitly embody the assumption of civilised superiority in the first place, which is rarely faced (Wouters 1998b). Working within the limits imposed by the high level of abstraction of the concept of ‘modernity’, the problem of self-confrontation is systematically avoided. The roominess of the concept of modernity— made ample by the qualifying terms ‘late’, ‘disorganised’ and ‘liquid’— also lends itself to the politicisation of sociological enquiry, as we have seen with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ variant in the hands of Giddens. 6. The notion of modernisation as a progression was elaborated by Parsons and Hoselitz and others in the 1950s at a peak of US power in the world, but the theory had the notorious drawback that it was effectively the ideology of the globally more powerful, richer nations. It implicitly assumed that underdeveloped countries would ultimately be expected to attain the same character of ‘modernity’ as the industrial societies of the West. (To avoid this the idea of ‘many modernities’ (Beck 1994: 24) has been developed (further discussion in Lee 2006).) In the

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extension of the concept of modernity into modernisation then to reflexive modernisation, the lack of a self-distanciation component became entrenched. This was partly because it did not have initially a conception of power relations between nations, that is, between the richer and developed nations and the less rich and underdeveloped ones (Wouters 1990c; Kilminster 1998, chapter 6). Nations were taken for granted as static and isolated, which suppressed the relatively privileged position of most of the researchers themselves, who were largely based in the richer nation-states. 7. It is revealing how many studies analysed in this chapter, coming from very different perspectives, are individualistic in one way or another, when one would have expected sociologists to be alert to this regression. Individuals were seen either as a ‘black box’ or as constructed by discourses or having only ‘practical consciousness’ but essentially as isolated. These conceptions of the individual bear the marks of a classical nineteenth-century image of people found in the liberal ideology and with echoes in homo economicus and which occurs widely in the social sciences. It is also prominent in American sociology, with its emphasis on the micro level of individual action and interaction (Mennell 2017). It appeared in Maffesoli’s philosophical anthropology as a sharp individual/ society division (which reflects the ego-­centred side of European philosophy) and in reflexive modernisation theory, particularly in Giddens’s imputation of instrumentalist motivations to people in supposedly ‘pure relationships’. 8. This kind of attitude towards individualism chimes in with the Utilitarian precept that individuals must be the judges of their own utility, which will manifest itself in their behaviour: that is, the sovereign individual writ large. We do not need to know anything about the individual psyche; it is people’s choices that are important. In modern economics it has become the notion of ‘revealed preference’. For all the sociological thrust of Marx’s worldview, he was unintendedly burdened with a liberal view of the individual taken over from political economy, particularly from Utilitarianism. Hence, he conspicuously has no sociological interest in personalities, emotions or individual feeling states. This inflection shows up later in Bauman’s dismissal of psychoanalysis and lack

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of sustained interest in a sociological p ­ sychology of any depth psychology at all. Nowhere does Bauman develop in any way a concept resembling ‘habitus’ or ‘figuration’ to bridge the chasm between individual and society. These reflections bring home just how resilient and enduring individualism has proved to be in the social sciences. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Tim Bickerstaffe, Anthea Kilminster, Stephen Mennell, Cath Morgan and Phil Sutton for many discussions about the issues raised here and/or for their comments on an earlier draft.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS

#MeToo, 74–77 A

Adventure, 261, 262 Aestheticisation/aestheticization, 191, 205, 209–213 Aesthetics, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 210n6, 211, 254, 257, 264 Aesthetic tension-balance, 209–212, 215 Affect, 7n1, 22, 24, 32, 164, 165, 177, 223, 249, 272 affect control, 120, 226, 335 Affective warmth, 57, 182, 183 After-marriage, 9 Agrarianisation, 171 Agrarian revolution, 41n3, 43

AIDS Memorial Day, 99 Al-Qaeda, 136, 221 Amatrice, 63, 64 Ambivalence, 16, 25, 67, 95–99, 114, 139–142, 159, 172, 304 Anger, 9, 76, 88, 136, 272, 302 Anthroposphere, 41n3, 44, 162, 167 Anti-Colonial Revolution, 158–159 Ariès, Phillipe, 86 Art establishment, 187, 191, 192, 194–196, 198, 199, 201–205, 207–209, 211–215 fine, vi, 187, 188, 191, 194, 214, 215 movement, 190, 195 Atomic bomb, 102

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 Cas Wouters, Michael Dunning (eds.), Civilisation and Informalisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00798-0

371

372 Index

Authentic, authenticity, 14, 83–85, 90, 187, 190, 194n5, 211, 213–215, 262, 266 Authority, authorities administrative, 104 autocratisation, 294–297 commercial, 104 political, 104 supernatural, 95 B

Bad-news conversations, 89 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 238 Bailey, Beth, 76, 153n10 Balance of formalisation and informalisation, 5, 25, 36, 37, 170, 176 of involvement and detachment, 33, 146, 170, 182, 183, 210n6 of power, 4, 39, 47, 59, 60, 119, 120, 131, 141, 143, 144, 147–158, 169, 170, 175, 176, 183, 208, 237, 304, 305 of tensions, tension-balance, 25, 132, 161–183, 209–212, 215, 316 we–I balance, 33, 81–116, 122, 170, 180, 181, 289, 322, 327 Bauman, Sigmund, vii, 95n6, 107, 108n14, 318, 320, 325, 327, 329, 334, 336–341, 336–337n5, 345, 346 Beatles, The, 20, 239, 240 Beauty

natural, 9 standard of, 8 Belonging, 65, 101, 103, 106, 115, 147 sense of, 57, 84, 94, 101, 102, 105–107, 133, 287 Benedict, Ruth, 31 Bereavement, 86 Biosphere, 41n3, 44, 167 Blair, Tony, 151 Blomert, Reinhard, 148, 159 Bobos, 260, 261 Bombing, bomb, 102, 103, 143 atomic, 102 Boundaries psychic, 177 social, 177, 181, 316 Bourgeoisie, 7, 144 Bra hard-look, 9 soft-look, 9 Breakthrough evolutionary, 36 of learning to play, 179 social and psychic, 36 Brutalisation, vi, 28, 217–245, 287 Bush, George W., 151 C

Californian, 256 Capitalism American, 153 investor, 152 Carnal desires, 58, 59, 66 experiences, 59 Caxton, William, 15, 75 Centres

 Index 

commercial, 119, 298 courtly, 119, 226 monetary, 51 political, 51, 119, 261 Chaperone, 173 Children, child innocent, 25 raising, rearing, 7, 9, 57 motivation, 57 Chippendales, 68 Civic responsibility, 109 Civilising, civilisation de-civilising, 25–27, 29, 172 direction, 4, 10, 15, 22, 23, 25, 45, 117, 121, 164, 236 process, 4, 5, 10, 14–16, 20, 22, 23, 26, 37, 48, 117, 120–122, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 172, 176, 183, 191, 206, 218, 223, 227, 236, 248, 248n3, 268, 296, 305, 307, 312 Civil society, 109 Coarse, coarsening, 28 Codes genetic, psychogenetic, 36, 44, 54 social, sociogenetic, 4–11, 13, 16, 17, 26, 36, 37, 39–42, 44–47, 49, 53–55, 67, 76, 94, 105, 114, 164, 173, 179, 213, 249, 265 See also Steering Cohesion, 95–97, 102, 106, 108, 136, 196, 207, 209, 242, 289 Coitus, first, 60, 79 Cold War, 103, 108, 147, 222, 257, 328

373

Collective effervescence, 324, 326 Colonialism, 142, 143, 227n9 Colonisation, colonising, colonised, 12, 118, 119, 121, 147, 218, 226, 234, 244, 283n7, 288 Communication, 41, 71, 73, 284n8, 322 means of, 40–42, 177 Communitarianism, 109 Community of believers, 95, 96 sense of, vi, 83, 111, 264, 330 symbolic, 83, 96, 100, 105, 108, 115 Compartmentalise, compartmentalisation, 22, 59, 67, 116 social and psychic, 50, 51 Competition and cooperation, 6, 147, 169–171, 173, 174, 177, 249 and interweaving, 48, 142, 144–147, 158, 159, 170, 312–313 for land, 119, 143 for money, 119, 147 for status, 90, 152, 209 Complexity, 15, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47–49, 51, 55, 65, 106, 128, 132, 138, 139, 142, 144, 145, 158, 223, 297 Comte, Auguste, 163n5 Confidence, 48, 129 self-confidence, 47, 48, 253 Confidential, confidentiality, 59, 62

374 Index

Connectedness, 83, 87, 96, 97, 100, 115 Conscience authoritarian, 7, 44 authoritative, 22, 44 collective, 28 conscience-dominated type of personality (rigid), 7 formation, 28, 29, 32, 206 Consciousness, 4, 5, 9, 9n3, 12, 20–22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 34, 38, 39, 44–46, 49, 66, 71, 80, 89, 153n10, 169, 177–179, 210, 211, 213, 225, 249, 268, 300, 316, 326, 335 Consumer culture, 107, 256, 257, 261, 262, 265, 266 Contrasts, 30, 82, 94, 96, 107n13, 120, 122, 147, 172, 189, 189n3, 190, 204, 206, 214, 215, 226, 250n4, 252, 257, 271, 280, 300, 304, 305, 324 diminishing, 23, 117–124, 170, 176, 224, 248n2, 296 Controlled decontrolling, 8, 11, 11n5, 18, 20, 26, 114, 157 of emotional controls, 10, 11, 17, 18, 18n7, 21, 29, 48, 51, 114, 178, 211, 250, 289 Controls focus and locus of, 33, 207 guilt-and-shame, 30 psychic, 27–29, 45, 182 social, 6, 11, 26, 27, 32–34, 42, 45, 46, 48, 51, 55, 57, 64, 65, 153n10, 155, 157, 161,

162n2, 163, 164, 168, 170, 173, 180, 183, 207, 233, 339, 342 triad of, 42, 44, 162–164, 162n3, 166–168, 174, 182, 183 Co-operation, see Competition Cooperation Last Will, 113 Corporality, 59 compartmentalised, 59 Corporations multinational, 26, 149 transnational, 26, 27 Corset, 8, 9, 14 Countercultural, 251, 252n6, 254n8, 266 Courage, courageous, 86–89, 91, 94, 97 Courtiers, 119, 134 Courting, 12, 61, 153n10, 270 Criteria, 160–183, 317n2 Critical degree of (preceding) formalisation, 6, 26–27, 154 Critical level, 6, 26–28, 45–48, 116, 176 of formalising manners and disciplining people, 26, 29, 46 Croner, Fritz, 145 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 74, 335 Cuban Missile Crisis, 103 Culture, vi, 43, 133, 135, 152, 179, 192, 201, 221, 240, 243, 252, 261, 276, 278–281, 285, 288, 299, 309, 315, 342 shock, 27

 Index  D

Daalen, Rineke van, x Dabiq (magazine), 217–220, 230 Dancing, 34, 61, 225, 262 De-Ba’athification, 237, 238 Debt crisis, 124 Decay, 26, 101, 230 Decision-making, 92, 294, 296, 311 Decolonisation, 13, 103, 119, 142–144, 147, 155, 174, 225, 276 Defence mechanism, 51, 88, 91, 97, 137, 289 Defunctionalisation, 124, 131–139, 233–237, 284, 285 Delegation theory, 145 Delegators, 92 Dementia, 112 Democratisation functional, vi, 6, 28, 117–160, 170, 172, 176, 224, 225, 227, 229, 233, 234, 301, 319 institutional, 45, 122, 126n5, 134 Denial, 63, 86, 88, 89 Deregulation, 26, 27, 119, 149, 157, 177, 277 Descartes, René, 24 Desire, carnal, 58, 59, 66 Despair, 83, 87, 92–95, 97, 318n4, 335 Diana, Princess, 111 Disenchantment, 100, 101, 202, 323 Disintegration, vi, 26, 106, 117, 124, 127, 131–139, 154, 158, 160, 172, 217–245, 254, 270, 285 of old we-groups, 106

375

Distance psychic, 5, 12, 90 social, 182, 287, 326, 328 Dividing lines psychic, 316 social, 90, 153n10 Divorce, 9, 69, 79, 91 DNA, 39 Domestication, 41n3, 47, 162, 166, 171, 172 of fire, 41n3, 47, 162, 166, 171, 172 Dominance, dominant, 4–9, 8n2, 12, 14, 21, 25, 26, 35–38, 41, 43, 45–48, 50, 55, 56, 67, 86, 88–90, 105, 119, 120, 124, 128, 129, 131–135, 138, 139, 142, 151, 152, 154, 167–172, 176, 178, 179, 181, 188, 194, 196, 199, 201, 203–205, 207, 215, 237, 244, 256, 267, 268, 277, 278, 287, 297, 299–301, 309, 310 Don’t ask, don’t tell, 60, 64 Drion, Huib, 112 Drion pill, 112, 113 Drives drive-controls, 8n1 innate, 36 malleable, 8n1 Driving force, 144, 158, 171, 182 Dunning, Eric, 11n5, 101n10, 128, 131, 209, 225n8, 234, 250, 250n4, 252n6 Dunning, Michael, v, vi, 223, 225, 226, 231, 242, 269n3, 287

376 Index

Durkheim, Émile, 128, 131, 163n5, 324, 326 Dying, 9, 12, 81–116 collective, 110, 287 E

Ecological, 137, 255, 262, 312, 329, 330 footprint, 137 Ecologism, 266 Economy, 106n12, 107, 134, 145, 148n7, 151, 276, 308, 312, 333, 339, 343, 345 Ego and super-ego functions, 8n1, 22 Elias, Norbert, vi, 4–7, 8n1, 10, 11, 11n5, 14–25, 25n9, 26n10, 33, 37, 39, 41–43, 46, 47n5, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 81, 83, 90, 102, 105, 110, 117–122, 119n2, 125–130, 125n4, 133, 134, 139, 140, 144, 150, 155, 161–166, 162n2, 162n4, 163n5, 169, 171, 174–176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 206, 208–210, 210n6, 217, 218, 220–224, 224n5, 224n6, 226, 227n9, 228, 232–234, 236, 237, 241, 242, 242n14, 245, 248, 248n1, 248n2, 250, 250n4, 267, 270, 274, 279, 282–288, 283n7, 284n8, 293, 295, 306, 307, 312, 317n3, 322, 325, 327, 335, 337, 338, 342, 344 Elimination contest, 49 Emancipation

cramp, 67, 68 of the dying, 92 of emotions, 5, 9, 11–13, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 51, 86–89, 92, 111, 177, 268 of feelings, 20, 21 of sexuality, 13, 67, 70, 79, 177, 180 of symbols, 39, 47 of women, 13, 53, 58, 73, 73n3, 174, 180, 227, 230 Emotional controls, 29 controlled decontrolling of, 10, 11, 17, 18, 18n7, 20, 21, 29, 48, 51, 114, 178, 207, 211, 250, 289 Emotion regulation, 4, 10, 12, 33, 86, 87, 91, 96, 135, 146, 162n2, 169, 269, 304 Emotions dangerous, 6, 10, 289 unlearned spontaneous, 44 Empathy, 13, 56, 58, 182 Emwazi, Mohammed (Jihadi John), 219, 239–241 Engagement, 61, 62, 64, 213 Equality, 80, 103, 104, 127, 131, 133, 142, 143, 158, 160, 208, 272, 276, 278, 285, 286, 288, 305, 332, 336 ideals of, 13, 95 Equanimity of welfare state, 69, 135 Eroticisation, 53–80 of sex, 60, 65, 180 Established–outsider models, 175 Established–outsider relations, 129, 147, 174, 176, 191, 208, 218, 224n5, 232, 267

 Index 

Established–outsider theory, 174, 176 Europe, vi, 5, 6, 95n6, 106n12, 107, 109, 121, 133–135, 140, 153, 157, 191–194, 196, 197, 203, 207, 213, 214, 219, 230, 243, 248n3, 285, 288, 289, 299, 302, 311, 328, 338 European Union (EU), 136, 137, 149, 155n12, 171 Euthanasia, 77, 90, 93, 112–113, 288 Evolution, 14n6, 35–51, 85n3, 158, 169, 172 Evolutionary regression, 43–45 Experiments, 66, 69, 92 Exposure, 43, 88, 165 Expressionism, 12, 198, 206 Expressive Revolution, 5, 10, 12, 82, 122, 325 F

Failed states, 133, 143 Fears of freedom, 67 inner, 7 Feudalism, 26, 43 Fight or flight, 43 Figuration, 80, 140, 141, 170, 175, 179, 183, 274, 313, 346 Fin de Siècle, 5, 12, 81, 268 Finance oligarchs, 151, 154, 160 Fire revolution, 39 Fitness, 8, 253, 255, 257, 258, 261, 264, 266 Fletcher, Jon, vi, 26, 223, 236n11

377

Flexibility, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44–46, 49, 56, 104, 107, 108n14, 173, 177, 260, 266 Football, 21, 156, 339 Forager, 294 band, 294 Foresight, 120, 121, 176, 193, 223, 226 Form, 8, 12, 14, 18–21, 24, 25n9, 27, 29, 31–33, 36, 38–42, 41n3, 44, 46, 47, 50, 55, 57, 59, 62, 67, 68, 79, 84–86, 90, 93, 96–99, 102, 103, 120, 121, 126, 128, 133, 134, 137, 140, 153n10, 154, 164, 167, 189, 191, 193, 194n5, 196, 197, 199–202, 204, 205, 207–209, 211, 213–215, 220, 221, 223, 225, 233, 240, 242, 248, 258, 292, 293, 296, 300, 307, 317n2, 318, 319, 324, 325, 331–333, 338, 340 Formal, 9, 21, 49, 61, 62, 82, 84, 88, 90, 104, 114, 155, 199, 202, 211, 272, 301, 302, 309, 328 Formalisation evolutionary, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44 long-term process of, 6, 8, 14, 38–46 psychic, 14n6 social, 14n6, 37, 55 Formality–informality span/gradient, 18n8 Foucault, Michel, 108n14, 318

378 Index

Freedom, 74, 92, 103, 107, 108n14, 143, 173, 206, 248n3, 256, 259, 260, 266, 324, 325, 337 Freud, Sigmund, 163n5, 334, 335, 338, 342, 343 Functional de-democratisation, 124, 129–131 defunctional de-democratisation, 124, 130, 131, 133 Functional democratisation, vi, 6, 28, 117–160, 170, 172, 176, 224, 225, 227, 229, 233, 234, 301 Functional differentiation integration and complexity, 38, 45, 48, 51, 144 levels of, 38, 45, 51, 171 Functions psychic, 21, 22, 34, 84, 177, 213 social, 6, 118, 120–123, 127, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 144, 148, 150, 154, 158, 159, 169, 172, 192, 226, 287, 296 Funeral, 82, 82n2, 87n5, 111, 229 ceremonies, 82, 82n2 G

Gated community, 157 Gedogen, 64 Globalisation, vi, vii, 103, 108, 117–160, 167, 182, 221, 282, 284n8, 285, 308, 312 God, 92, 96n8, 149, 220, 230, 297, 298, 327 Goffman, Irving, 96n7

Good society global, 103, 109 local aristocracy, 175 Goudsblom, Johan, 20, 32, 39, 44, 47, 48n6, 51, 51n8, 55, 106n11, 145, 162, 162n3, 163n5, 166, 167, 171, 172, 274, 344 Greyscale, 188n2, 190 Grief, 86–88, 99, 105, 108, 111, 115 Group f/64, 200, 201, 213 Guidelines, 4, 13, 37, 45, 56, 163, 166, 177, 298 Guilt guilt-cultures, 31–34 inner-directed, 30, 32–34 H

Habitus, 6, 7, 14, 19, 28, 47, 48, 51, 56, 62, 75, 80, 248n3, 249, 287, 307, 309, 310, 331, 346 social, 84, 110, 133, 208, 212, 249, 305 Health, 12, 71, 110, 177, 252–255, 257, 258, 261, 265, 266 Hierarchy, hierarchical, 21, 27, 68, 83, 90, 95, 96n7, 103, 104, 128, 133, 169, 178, 249, 256, 280, 286, 289, 296, 299, 308–310, 316, 326, 339 History of humanity, 37, 54 of learning, 54 of life on earth, 37

 Index 

of love, 54 Hominoids, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46–48 Homo ludens, 114 Homo sapiens, vi, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 46, 48, 54, 293 Homosexuality, 58, 230 Honour, v, 85, 91, 104, 280 Hussein, Saddam, 238 Huxley, Julian, 38n2 I

Id, 22 Ideals figurational, 80, 179 relational, 67, 179 Identification level of, 27, 30, 342 mutual, 12, 26, 27, 30, 223, 240, 274, 283n7, 342 Ideology, 57, 105, 143, 218, 221, 222, 222n4, 235, 287, 330, 333, 338, 344, 345 I-ideals, 97, 102, 108 I-identity, 84, 85, 88, 103, 180, 181 Image-making, 187, 193, 198–200, 211, 212, 214, 215 Imagination, 12, 13, 112, 113, 212 realms of, 12, 13 Imperialism, 135, 174, 221, 229 Impersonal, 90, 305 Incest, 58, 71 Individualisation, 24, 84–85, 92, 103, 104, 180, 181, 191, 205–207, 273 Individuation, 180, 181 Industrial revolution, 41n3, 158, 167, 172

379

Industrialisation, 125, 125n4, 145, 148, 171, 193, 252 Inequality, 29, 51, 72, 79, 121–123, 127, 128, 130–133, 138, 159, 160, 174, 180, 234, 268, 277, 285, 286, 298, 311, 318n4 Inferiority, 13, 29, 30, 34 feelings, 13, 29, 30, 34 Informalisation of courting, 61 evolutionary, 35, 36, 39–42, 44–46, 49 of the labour market, 27 long-term phase of, 4, 5, 14, 21, 22, 269n2 of manners, vii, 4, 9, 10, 12, 28, 29, 124, 178, 268, 291–313 in patterns of emotion regulation, 10 process, v, 8, 10, 14, 15, 18, 19, 31, 33, 34, 37, 44, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 121, 122, 160, 176–178, 191, 194n5, 203, 205, 207, 209, 215, 225, 229, 286, 289, 302, 309 psychic, 5, 10, 11, 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 45, 50, 51, 160, 177, 178, 206, 211 of psychic and social codes, 14n6, 45 short-term phase of, 5, 122 theory, vii, 4, 15, 17, 21, 23, 247, 248n1, 250, 266 Inheritance biological, 36 social, 36 Inner compass, 7

380 Index

Inner-directed, 30, 32–34, 49, 135, 198 Insecurity, 85, 101, 102, 106–108, 153n10, 188, 264, 274, 286, 287, 304 feelings of, 101, 102, 106–108 Integration biological, 36, 46 conflicts, vi, vii, 28–30, 51, 117, 124, 131, 132, 134–138, 154, 158, 160, 218, 229, 233–235, 244, 267–289 levels of, 8n2, 46, 48, 114, 128, 131, 132, 154, 169, 283–285, 287, 296, 300, 306, 312 psychic, 28–30, 36, 48, 50, 51, 283, 289n9, 342 social, vi, 27–30, 36, 48, 50, 51, 95, 127, 160, 169, 170, 172, 223, 249, 251, 265, 281n5, 283, 289n9, 296, 298, 342 Interdependence, 12, 26, 55, 56, 119–121, 128–130, 136, 139–142, 163n5, 167, 169, 174, 222, 223, 225, 233, 235, 285, 301 networks of, 55, 139, 169, 174, 285, 301 International Monetary Fund, 109 Intimacy personal, 59 relational, 13, 53, 58–60, 62, 65–72, 80, 180 sexual, 53, 65–72, 80, 170 Iraq, 133, 143, 150, 151, 219, 228, 231, 234, 236–241, 238n12

Iron Curtain, 108, 142 Islam, 220, 228, 230, 278, 280 Islamic State, 136, 231 See also Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 217–222, 224, 227, 228, 230–233, 235–241, 243, 245 J

Jazz, 20 Jihad, 220, 232, 241 K

Keizer, Bert, 93, 94 Kilminster, Richard, vii, 21, 38n2, 106n11, 163n5, 165, 210n6, 316n1, 316n2, 317n3, 318, 320, 321, 323, 327, 328, 331, 333, 334, 336, 337, 337n5, 345 Knowledge, 12, 13, 37, 39, 43–45, 48, 54, 55, 90, 165, 182, 183, 293, 300, 308, 312, 327, 329, 330, 338, 342 reservoirs of, 44, 54 Kodachrome, 203 Kohut, Heinz, 31 L

Lamy, Pascal, 151, 153 Language, 36, 41–43, 72, 96n7, 114, 135, 225, 230, 240, 276, 279, 293, 300, 301, 311, 313

 Index 

Latin America, 157 Learn ability to, 42 necessity to, 42 Lee, Harper, 86, 344 Leisure, 11n5, 17, 20, 21, 250, 250n4, 261, 265, 266 Leniency, 4, 28, 53, 268 Lenski, Gerhard, 158 Level of danger, 43, 165 of equality, 57, 79, 80 of functional differentiation, 38, 45, 51, 171 integration and complexity, 38, 45, 51, 55, 128, 144 of intimacy, 57, 80 of fantasy, 43, 165 of synthesis, 168, 183 Level playing fields, 27 Liberation, 8, 11, 16, 18, 66, 104, 181, 256 Linked Ring Brotherhood, 196 Linklater, Andrew, 149, 217n1, 218, 226, 227, 231, 233, 285 Lip-service, 60 Liquid modernity, 318, 336, 338, 339 Longing, 30, 58, 59, 67, 69, 71, 78, 81, 84, 97, 100–102, 105–107, 109, 136, 179, 269, 280, 287 Longue durée, 24, 25 Love desexualised, 58, 179 romantic, 25, 67, 179, 180 Love-and-learn processes, 37, 42, 49, 54 relationships, 49, 54

381

Low-wage countries, 26, 138 Lust, 9, 13, 53–80, 170, 179, 180 revival, 68, 69 Lust balance, vi, 54, 58–59, 67, 69–71, 74, 78–81, 170, 179, 180, 210n7 question, 58, 66, 80, 179, 180 M

Maffesoli, Michel, vii, 107, 107n13, 318, 323–328, 331, 345 Management through command, 50 through negotiation, 50 Manners bathing, 16, 19 relaxation of, 16, 21, 23 Mannheim, Karl, 165, 315, 317n3 Market, 7, 88, 113, 119, 124, 129, 138, 140, 145, 149, 152, 153, 172, 256, 258, 276, 288, 330 ideology, 105 Masturbation, 65, 68, 177 Material security, 48, 123, 133, 144, 147–158 level of, 47, 48, 57, 144, 157 May, Theresa, 151 McNamara, Robert, 103 Meaningless, meaninglessness, 86, 234, 235 Mechanism of competition and interweaving, 49, 142, 144–146, 158, 170, 171 of competition and monopoly, 120, 144

382 Index

Medieval (Middle Ages), 26, 219, 220, 248, 253, 292, 344 Meeting, vii, 61, 62, 291–313 Meetingisation, 294–299, 305, 307–310, 312 Meeting manners, vii, 12, 291–313 Memento mori, 112–116 Mennell, Stephen, 26, 123, 128–131, 151, 161n1, 171, 188n1, 234, 248n3, 284, 344, 345 Merger waves, 136, 149 Middle classes, 12, 62, 63, 157, 192, 193, 236, 251, 256, 260, 285, 286 Midler, Bette, 85 Model of models, 175 game models, 175 Modernism, 206 Modernity, 318, 319, 324, 329, 338, 339, 343–345 Modernization, 329, 343 Moneycrats, 151, 160 Money lords, 119 Monochrome, 187–193, 188n2, 189n3, 204, 212–215 Monogamy, 69, 73, 79 serial, 69, 79 Moral contest, 4, 5 Mortality, sense of, vi, 89, 114 Mourning anticipatory, 113 collective, vi, 89, 95, 111, 112 communities of, vi, 110, 111 ritual, vi, 81–116 Mutual attraction, 69, 77 Mutual consent, 65, 67, 69, 77, 79, 90

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), 103, 142 Mutual respect, 142 N

National pride, 288 Nation-state, 30, 43, 51, 95, 100, 102, 106, 108–110, 115, 130, 134, 136, 140–146, 148–150, 153, 154, 156–158, 182, 193, 284n8, 295, 296, 315, 317, 342, 345 Natural selection, 36, 37, 39, 48 Nature first, 7, 7n1, 9, 13, 14, 28, 42, 177, 178 second, 7, 9, 13, 14, 22, 24, 28–30, 32, 162n2, 177, 178, 206, 212, 249, 307 third, 13, 14, 24, 28, 29, 34, 51, 178, 206, 207, 211, 249, 289n9, 331 Nazi Germany, 50 Neo-tribes, 107, 107n13, 323–328 Netherlands, vii, 54n1, 61, 66, 70, 71, 74, 77, 83, 84, 91, 95n6, 111, 112, 134, 152, 155, 177, 248, 267–289 Networks closed, 89–92 of interdependency, 6, 7, 56, 90, 104, 106, 109, 118, 122, 127, 131, 133, 139, 142–144, 147, 169–171, 173, 285, 301 open, 89–92

 Index 

Nostalgia, 100, 287 nostalgic longing, 100–101 Nude, nudity, 16, 76, 78, 190 Nurture, 42, 194, 210n6 O

Obituary notices, 82, 97–99, 111 Openness, 10, 56, 58, 78, 80, 113, 177, 183, 211, 213 Opium et mentiri, 87 Options, 3, 4, 13, 20, 21, 23, 36, 45, 47, 56, 59, 60, 93, 111, 152, 177, 187, 192, 203, 214 Organisation, 6, 51, 55, 92, 105, 107, 109, 115, 127, 128, 132, 133, 135–137, 141–143, 148, 151, 155, 156, 164, 167, 169, 170, 172, 191, 193n4, 196, 218, 233, 238, 272, 291, 294–297, 309, 311 Orgasm, 66 Orgiastic sociality, 327 Orientation, 41, 126, 137, 152, 244, 268, 288, 305 means of, 31, 40, 43, 292 Orwell, George, 102, 103 Other-directed, 30, 32–34, 49, 135 P

Pacification, 55, 102, 119, 143, 155, 157, 171, 244 Paedophilia, paedophiles, 58, 70, 71, 80

383

Painting, 12, 187, 191, 193–202, 206, 208, 212, 214 Panama Papers, 156 Paradise Papers, 156 Paradox, 11, 78–80, 124, 276, 288–289 Para-militarisation, 156, 157 Para-sociology, 318–323, 325 Parkes, Collin, 114 Parliament(arisation), 277, 299–301, 309–311 Peaceful Coexistence, 108 Permissiveness, 3, 23, 28, 57, 183, 280, 288–289 Perspective, vi, 4, 15, 18, 24, 27, 28, 30–34, 36, 43, 47, 75, 78, 96n7, 100, 103, 106, 106n12, 108, 128, 130, 132–136, 138, 139, 144–146, 158, 163n5, 164, 166, 168, 182, 189n3, 191, 200, 206, 208, 212, 214, 266, 268, 278, 279, 284, 285, 317n3, 322, 323, 326, 329–332, 342, 343 global, 5, 123, 124, 131, 137, 138, 150, 153 Phases of accommodation and resignation, 105, 106n11, 268 of emancipation and resistance, 104, 105, 106n11 of formalising manners and disciplining people, 6, 8, 176 Philosophical anthropology, 322, 323, 345

384 Index

Photography black & white, vi, 187–215 colour, 187, 189, 189n3, 190, 203–205, 213–215, 271 documentary, 191, 202, 204 impressionist, 195, 196, 212 Pictorialist, 195–198, 201, 209–211, 213 portrait, 190–193, 200 realist, 201, 202, 214 straight, 194, 194n5, 197, 203 Photo-Secession, 197, 201 Physical safety, 47, 48, 57, 123, 133, 144, 147–158 level of, 144, 157 Pia fraus, sacred lies, 87 Pill, the, 60, 167 Pincer movement, 69, 80 Plastic surgery, 9 Politicians, 51, 56, 109, 147–160, 193, 237, 268, 279, 280, 282, 285, 288 Populism, 137, 182, 281n5 Porcelijn, Babette, 138 Pornification, 70, 80 Post, Arjan, v, vii, 77, 106n12, 269, 273, 274, 283n7, 284 Postcolonial era, 119, 143, 144, 158 Power, balance of, 4, 24, 29, 39, 47, 51, 59, 60, 119, 120, 131, 141, 143, 144, 147–158, 169, 170, 175, 176, 183, 208, 283, 283n7, 287, 301, 304, 305, 309, 310 Powerless, powerlessness, 83, 87, 92–95, 97, 109, 114, 115 Prela, 73, 74 Presence of mind, 45, 46, 178

Pressure from above, 105, 226 from below, 104 Process, processes collective, 59–60 continuity, 64–65, 77, 153n10 double-bind, 165, 221, 222, 287 drivers, 6, 48, 50, 118, 120, 132, 139 extra-human, 42, 162, 167 figurational, 183 inter-human, 167 intra-human, 167 part-processes, vi, 29, 47, 60, 127, 132–139, 154, 158, 183, 213, 217–245, 317, 322 psychic, 4, 11, 23, 108, 161–183, 250n4 trial and error, 53, 59–61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 78 Prognosis, 90, 93, 94 Protection industry, 157 self, 97, 109n16 social, 97 Psychic defence mechanism, 51 Psychical distance, 210n6 Psychical functions, 42 Psychologisation, 23, 33, 269n2 Q

Queen, 101, 194 Quest for excitement, 17, 18n7, 250 for new rituals, 82–85, 97, 102, 108, 114

 Index  R

Radicalisation, 222, 235 Rank, 12, 19, 71, 137, 153n10, 174, 193, 194, 214, 237, 239, 248n3, 283, 289 Recognition, 4, 83, 113–115, 194, 202, 254 social, 83, 86, 87, 115 Reductionism, 43, 118, 120, 121, 125–128, 143, 154, 226, 233, 236, 244, 277, 305 Ree, Hans, 100 Reflexive, reflexivity, reflectivity, 5, 10, 12, 28, 29, 33, 34, 44, 45, 48, 56–58, 90, 114, 177, 178, 182, 183, 206, 207, 289, 303, 321, 325, 328–335, 341, 345 Reformalisation/reformalization, vii, 5, 26, 83, 84, 122, 247, 256–270, 288, 326 Refugee, refugee crisis, 133, 269, 275, 287 Regimes of manners and emotion regulation, 3, 135, 146, 269 of silence and sacred lies, 9, 86–89 steering, 46 Regression, 26, 43–45, 268, 300, 345 Relational fulfilment, 54 ideal, 179 intimacy, 13, 53, 58–60, 62, 65–72, 80, 180 Renaissance, vi, 23–26, 25n9, 35 Repression, 88, 89, 319, 342

385

Restraints external, 153n10, 173 mutually expected self-, 26–28, 142, 173 self-, 7, 25–28, 33, 119, 142, 162n2, 175–177, 223, 229, 243, 274, 306, 307, 331 Revival of death, 84 Revolution, 41n3, 43, 67, 134, 167, 172, 230, 251, 252, 256, 258–260, 268, 276, 287, 293, 298, 325 Riesman, David, 7, 30, 33, 49, 135 Rituals everyday, 96n7 religious, 95 Roaring twenties, 5, 12, 81, 249, 268, 316 Roman Empire, 26, 43, 133, 134, 298 Romanticise, romanticisation, 92, 101, 147, 264, 266 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25, 326 Royal mechanism, 141 Rules of order, 300, 302 Rump, Paul, x S

Sacred lies, 9, 86–89 Salafi-jihadism, 217–222, 241–245 Santa Claus, 100 Scharrel, scharrelen, 63, 73, 74 Schröter, Michael, 31, 41, 165 Scotson, John, 155, 174, 175, 208, 224n5, 226, 228, 242, 274, 279, 285

386 Index

Sculpture, 82n2, 187, 191, 194, 196, 198, 208, 212, 214 Second nature personality, 24, 32, 206, 212 second-nature discipline and self-regulation, 7 second-nature steering code, 7 Secularisation, 95, 96n7, 100, 101, 288 Self-confident, 114 Self-controls decline in, 16 standards of, 10 Self-deception, 97 Self-evaluation, 174, 175 Self-help, 254, 263, 265 Self-protection, 97, 109n16 Self-regulation, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 29, 33, 39, 41, 44–46, 55, 57, 103, 104, 107, 114, 168, 169, 173, 178–180, 182, 206, 211, 212, 268, 316, 322, 328, 329, 341–343 demands on, 17, 19, 21, 41, 44, 45, 104, 107, 268 personality, 5, 212 reflexive and flexible, 5, 13, 28, 29, 33, 114, 178, 206 second-nature type of, 7 third-nature type of, 13 Self-steering, 3, 4, 11, 23, 57, 65, 77, 180, 207, 211, 225 ego- or I dominated, 22 Sennett, Richard, 108n14, 109n16, 341 Sex, sexual depersonalised, 58

gratification, 58, 59, 70, 179 intimacy, 53, 58–60, 65–72, 80, 170, 179 longings, 53, 58, 70 objects, 53, 58–60, 68 oppression, 67 oral, 68 pleasure, 54, 59, 60, 67, 69, 77 sensualisation of, 60, 65 separatism, 67, 68 slow, 70 subjects, 53, 58–60, 67, 68, 80 Sexology, 54n1, 65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 79 Sexual revolution, 58–60, 64, 66, 67, 70, 167, 230, 251, 256 Sexualisation, sensualisation, 53–80, 177 of love, 60, 65, 68, 180 Shame other-directed, 30, 32–34 shame cultures, 31–34 shame-fears, 10, 32, 33 Shaming cultures, 32 mechanisms, 31 rituals, 32 Shareholder value, 152 Simmel, Georg, 163n5 Slippery slope, 34, 214 fear of, 7, 173 Social class, 11–13, 24, 57–59, 61–62, 64, 65, 75, 114, 130, 140, 174, 179, 180, 200, 281n5 differences, 77–78 Social controls, 6, 7, 26, 27, 29, 32–34, 42, 46, 51, 55, 57,

 Index 

64, 65, 153n10, 155, 164, 168, 173, 180, 183, 233, 339 on self-controls, 6, 11, 28, 45, 48, 157, 161, 162n2, 163, 164, 170, 173, 342 Social diagnosis, 12, 315–346 Social distance, 182, 287, 326, 328 proximity, 285 Social dividing lines, 90, 153n10 Social recognition of loss/grief, 83, 86, 87 Social stratification, 123, 124, 172, 283 Sociologization, 33 Solidarity crisis, 101 religious, 101 Solidarization, 84–85 Speciation, 35, 36, 38 Spencer, Herbert, 38n2, 172 Spiral movement, 26, 181 Spiral staircase, 24, 26, 49, 179 Sport-games, 209, 210 Sportisation, 250, 252n6 Sports, vii, 8, 11n5, 12, 13, 17, 19, 61, 101, 191, 209, 247–266, 324 spectator, 21, 209 Status competition, 152, 209 enhancing, 64, 241, 244 insecurity, 153n10, 274, 286, 287 superiority, 175, 176 Steele, Valerie, 9 Steering capacity, 4, 11, 36, 40, 45, 292–293

387

regime, 46 Steering codes collectively, 36, 38, 42 genetic, 36, 44, 54 innate, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 learned, 5, 36, 42, 43 psychic, 14n6, 45 social, 4–6, 8n2, 13, 21, 23, 28, 35–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 50n7, 97, 301 Stiff upper lip, 7 Stigmatise, stigmatisation, 72, 175, 219, 220, 224, 228–231, 242, 244 Stock exchange, 145 market, 145 Superego, 7, 8n1, 20, 22, 121, 249 Superiorism, 154, 154n11, 265 Superiority, 13, 66, 154n11, 227, 232, 233, 249, 278, 344 feelings, 13, 29, 30, 34, 109, 182, 232, 249, 252, 255, 284n8 Survival chances, 39, 41n3, 46, 133 functions, 42 and life-chances, 36 menu, 39 unit, 46, 49, 133, 134, 234, 235, 287, 295–297 Swaan, Abram de, 50, 274, 283n7, 286, 287, 289, 327 Symbolic communitas, 83, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99n9, 110, 111, 115 Symbols, 14, 31, 36, 39–43, 47, 48, 100, 120, 136, 204, 256, 257, 268, 282, 293 revolution, 39, 293

388 Index

Synopsis, 117, 218 Synthesis, 3, 38n2, 42, 44, 46, 48, 139, 163, 163n5, 168, 175, 183, 261, 266

Turner, Ralph, 31 Turner, Victor, 83 U

T

Taliban, 136 Taste bad, 98 good, 98, 195 Taxation, 123, 134, 147, 148, 171, 223, 299 Technology, 6, 49, 118, 120, 128, 167, 168, 298 Tension-balance, 132, 161–183, 316 aesthetic, 210–212 Texture, 189, 189n3, 190, 200, 201, 204, 206, 209, 214, 215, 332 Tight ass, 7 Toguna, 306 Transition, period of, 96 Trends co-dominant, 171, 172 counter, 25, 123, 127, 170–172, 217, 297 sub-trends, 170–172, 297 Triad of controls, 42, 44, 162–164, 162n3, 166–168, 174, 182, 183 Trial and error, 53, 59–62, 65–72, 78 Tribe, tribal, 107, 234, 238, 262, 263, 266, 284, 294, 295, 298, 299, 306, 324–327 Trust, level of, 173, 181 Try-out relationships, 64, 65, 69, 72–74, 78, 79

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 103 United Kingdom (UK), 150, 151, 232n10, 234, 239, 241, 242, 269, 278 United Nations, 109, 150 Upper classes, 6, 12, 64, 103, 119, 226, 307 global, 106n12, 109, 137, 181, 182, 284 USA, 5, 75, 89, 99, 103, 110, 130, 131, 147, 150, 151, 153n10, 155n12, 157, 247–266, 300, 301, 311 USSR, 142, 143 V

Varieties, 3, 4, 9n3, 23, 40, 42, 75, 78, 85, 92, 100, 121, 145, 153n10, 165, 197, 200, 231, 244, 248, 271, 304 increasing, 11, 23, 38, 55, 117–124, 147, 162n2, 170, 172, 176, 248n2, 286, 296 Verkering, 62–64, 66, 72 Vermeulen, Eric, x Vertigans, Stephen, 130n6, 155, 217n1, 220n3, 228, 241, 242, 244 Violence, 102, 111, 133, 134, 143–145, 147, 157, 171, 174, 219–223, 222n4, 227, 228, 230–233, 235,

 Index 

238–243, 257, 294–296, 312, 313 sexual, 7, 67, 69, 74–77 Voorzanger, Bart, x W

Waldhoff, Hans-Peter, 11, 29, 35n1, 71, 101, 169, 208, 279, 280, 287, 288 Waller, Willard, 153n10 Walter, Tony, 84, 85n3, 88, 95n6, 110 Warmth, 54, 56, 57, 78, 80, 182, 183 Weakness, 29, 45, 49, 87, 88 Weber, Max, 163n5 We-feelings religious, 101 societal, 101 traditional, 97 We-group, 62, 87, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 106n12, 108, 110, 137, 146, 180, 181, 229, 242, 244 We–I balance, 33, 81–116, 122, 170, 180, 181, 289 We-ideals, 84, 95, 97, 102, 105, 106, 108, 198, 208, 214 We-identification with the established, 105 with rising groups of outsiders, 105 We-identity, 84, 88, 91, 95, 100–104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 136, 180–182, 196, 198, 207, 209, 235 We-image, 95, 110, 174, 175, 238, 242, 248n3, 289

389

Welfare state, 69, 89, 104, 114, 135, 148, 150, 275 Wellness, 261, 264 We-relationships, 103, 104 voluntary, 103, 104 West, 3, 5, 8n2, 11n5, 47, 54n1, 56, 75, 81, 84, 92, 103, 104, 106, 106n12, 109, 118–121, 123, 124, 137, 138, 141, 145, 147, 176, 181, 182, 215, 218, 219, 221, 224, 226–235, 239–245, 284, 299, 344 Western countries, 60, 71, 95n6, 124, 136–138, 146, 177, 268, 269, 276, 281, 289, 311 non-Western, 8n2, 91, 92, 267, 269, 277 Working class, 13, 62, 106, 174, 234, 278 World Bank, 109, 123, 149 World Trade Organisation (WTO), 109, 151, 153, 155n12 World War, 12, 57, 60, 102, 103, 134, 143, 145, 146, 213, 236, 251, 276 Wouters, Cas, v, 5, 6, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18n7, 22, 23, 26, 29, 33, 37, 51, 55, 61–65, 65n2, 67, 69, 71, 76, 80, 81, 86, 90, 105, 122, 124, 135, 136, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152, 153n10, 154, 154n11, 158, 164, 171, 174, 177, 178, 180, 188n1, 190, 206–208, 210n7, 211, 215,

390 Index

217, 217n1, 223–225, 224n6, 229, 230, 233, 234, 247–252, 248n1, 248n2, 248n3, 250n4, 254, 256, 269, 269n2, 274, 278–280, 283n7, 284n8, 285, 286, 289, 289n9, 296, 302, 304, 307, 316n1, 331, 342, 344, 345 Wuthnow, Robert, 95n6

Y

Yuppie, 256, 258, 260, 266 Z

Zero sum principle, 84 Zoom zooming in, 146 zooming out, 146