Abstract
Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death.
Norbert Elias (1897–1990) focused on how civilizing pressures spread ‘from above’. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) detailed how disciplining spreads ‘from below’. Notwithstanding their divergent approaches and empirical foci – most importantly, royal courts for Elias and early modern prisons for Foucault – in their most important studies, they ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental process. These two authors’ insights into this foundational process have yet to be fully recognized, let alone optimally combined. This is in part, we suggest, because that which unifies these two scholars’ differently articulated and seemingly incongruous approaches has remained poorly illuminated, if not completely hidden from view. Understanding why, despite all their differences, Foucault and Elias were capable of making the same discovery about the same primordial process may help more social scientists come to terms with the profundity and current relevance of their shared insights into how people learn to control their emotions and themselves.
In what follows, we attempt to show why and how: (1) exposure to philosophical networks and traditions associated with Martin Heidegger’s break from Edmund Husserl; (2) sustained contact with ‘clinical’ domains and practices; and (3) a series of more or less traumatic events related to intentional injury and death sensitized and equipped Elias and Foucault to discover the visceral foundation of what might be called the ‘social constraints to self-discipline’ process. Before zooming in on these three sources of their creativity and suffering, however, it might be useful to clarify the wider social-scientific project to which Elias and Foucault contributed.
We begin with the rationalization process and, most obviously, with the work of Max Weber. Rationalization emerged (along with individualization) out of sociology’s classical era as one of the basic conceptual building-blocks orienting social-scientific research on the West’s drift into modernity (Honneth, 2004: 463). Weber himself saw, however, that there was an even more elementary process operating, one might say, beneath rationalization in its more crystallized form. As Rogers Brubaker (1984: 9) has put it, rationality in the ‘objectified form’ as conceptualized by Weber ‘presupposed the prior development within individuals of a certain highly peculiar kind of rational inner orientation’. Weber’s approach to this primordial ‘process of internal or subjective rationalization’ was, Brubaker reminds us, based on his study of the ‘development among ascetic Protestants of a rigorously disciplined way of life (Lebensführung) based on constant self-scrutiny and methodical self-control’.
While their rich and multifaceted contributions cannot be reduced exclusively to this, Elias and Foucault certainly did take up Weber’s challenge to delve deeper into this ‘prior’ development, the internalization of social disciplining and acquisition of capacities for self-restraint. Focusing micro-historically on France in their finest works allowed them to investigate both of Weber’s key claims about this precursory development: first, that Protestants developed significantly greater capacities for internal self-reflection and self-control than Catholics due mainly to their ‘ethic’; and, second, that the spread of originally religious ideas (about asceticism) is most basically what spurred rationalization across various ‘life orders’ throughout the Western world. For them, the question was this: how central were cultural beliefs, ideas, discourses, meanings, and interpretations in the expansion of capacities for self-monitoring and self-control in early modern Europe?
In comparison with the later conceptual advancements of Foucault and Elias, Weber’s theory of what took place beneath rationalization in the objectified form is, unsurprisingly, the ‘sketchiest’ (Gorski, 2003: 32). Moreover, as we endeavor to show, no matter what label one uses (disciplining, civilizing, or something else), at the most fundamental level, what Elias and Foucault theorized more effectively than Weber or anyone in the history of the social sciences are the at-once situationally embedded and pre-discursively embodied foundations of the learning process unfolding beneath rationalization in its objectified form.
The notion that, independently of each other, Elias and Foucault made the same discovery may at first glance strike readers as absurd. After all, despite the profound affinities between these two obviously Weberian thinkers (cf. Breuer, 1994; Turner, 2004; Szakolczai, 2013), affinities which Foucault himself seems to have verified late in life when he translated into French one of Elias’s books 2 – one can easily be seduced into focusing on their immediately detectable differences. This is due in part to the strikingly different idioms Elias and Foucault employed. Even if we bracket ‘civilizing’ and ‘disciplining’, the ways in which Foucault and Elias expressed themselves could make it seem as though their analytic frameworks emerged out of diverging intellectual traditions bound to orient research in incongruous ways. Perhaps this helps explain why consequential works explicitly informed by both Elias and Foucault – such as Philip Gorski’s (2003) The Disciplinary Revolution – remain so rare. 3 Yet, there is at the bedrock level of both Elias and Foucault’s conceptual work on civilizing/disciplining a stable and shared insight about indivisibly whole beings pre-discursively absorbed in webs of relations promoting the single development Weber saw as prior to rationality in the objectified form: comparatively great capacities for self-control.
Oddly, the primordial self-control learning process in question continues to receive scant attention from social scientists even as it receives a great deal of attention from leading neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists and professors of medicine (e.g. Kabat-Zinn and Davidson, 2011; Davidson, 2012; Van der Kolk, 2014). Our goal here is to help bring the visceral foundation of the social constraints to the self-discipline process into the social-scientific mainstream.
Of course, a number of highly competent scholars (e.g., Van Krieken, 1990; Newton, 1995; Williams and Bendelow, 1998; Smith, 1999; Hughes, 2010; Dolan, 2010; Dunning and Hughes, 2013) already have treated together certain aspects of Elias’s and Foucault’ work. We are glad to be informed by their efforts. Yet in systematically addressing these two scholars’ intellectual sources and experiential bases of understanding in the section that immediately follows – and in highlighting in the section after that how their similarly socialized sensitivities helped them arrive at the same basic insight – this article attempts to do something that has not yet been done. As our final remarks returning to Max Weber’s work on rationalization suggest, uncovering these two scholars’ shared roots and profound commonalities in no way implies becoming blind to their differences or weaknesses. But this act of revealing and re-appropriating may be the best way to start pragmatically cashing in on our Eliasian and Foucauldian inheritances.
Overlapping roots
Let us turn now to our two scholars’ intellectual and experiential roots. After laying bare their (self-concealed) connections to the philosophical tradition associated most obviously with phenomenology, we will move on to their similarly high levels of exposure to medical worlds, clinical practices, and more or less traumatic experiences.
Exposure to an ontological critique and the explication of what Heidegger left implicit
In 1924, Elias graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy from the University of Breslau. In 1951, Foucault aggregated in philosophy from the École Normale. For obvious reasons, revealing their intellectual sources requires that we take seriously the subtle play of philosophical ideas in which they were steeped during highly formative years of their lives. We have to start with the ‘father of phenomenology’. Husserl argued that it is impossible to separate consciousness itself from the objects towards which it is directed. To return to the ‘things themselves’ was, as he put it, to enact a useful ‘phenomenological reduction’ based on this insight. This reduction allowed, Husserl argued, for the systematic interrogation of how consciousness is – for the most part tacitly, and here he spoke of the ‘natural attitude’ –directed towards, for example, time. Anticipating later developments in sociology and other disciplines (thanks to intermediaries like Alfred Schütz), Husserl claimed that his method revealed for the first time the basic (empathic or inter-subjective yet essentially ego-based) mental structures allowing the objects spontaneously taken for granted in one’s everyday lifeworld to ‘constitute themselves’ in consciousness.
Innovative as his approach was, Husserl remained within a framework positing separate subjects knowing external objects. It is precisely this subject/object and internal/external duality against which Husserl’s most (in)famous student reacted. With the publication of Being and Time, which was dedicated ‘in friendship and admiration’ to Husserl when originally published in German in 1927, Heidegger rebelled against the notion that analyses of actual ways of being should begin with – or be based on – isolated, self-enclosed subjects standing over against external objects (that are being contemplated). Instead of positing the centrality of subject/object dichotomies to the human situation, Heidegger developed the more thoroughly relational and processual notion of ‘always already’ situationally enmeshed, socially familiarized, and affectively predisposed beings forced to cope in real time (cf. Dreyfus, 1991). 4 The conspicuous hyphens connecting the term ‘being-in-the-world’ signify Heidegger’s escape from the subject/object duality and his attempt to grasp the meaning of being through concepts suitable for a holistic analysis of a unitary phenomenon. ‘Philosophy’, as Collins (1998: 748) remarks, was ‘set on a new course’.
Cagey as Foucault evidently felt he needed to be on this subject, it has been well known for some time that Heidegger’s critique of Husserl had an enormous influence on him. As Miller (1993: 50–1) illustrates, Foucault’s first publication (in 1954) was warmly sympathetic to the ‘great Heideggerian psychiatrist’ Ludwig Binswanger; Foucault’s The Order of Things ([1966] 1994) ‘clearly alludes to without explicitly naming’ Heidegger; and on his deathbed it seems Foucault confessed to having been a Heideggerian all along. More importantly, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) detail exactly how Foucault’s mature works were grounded in Heidegger’s brand of existential phenomenology.
In Elias’s case, by contrast, the influence of the networks producing the Husserl-Heidegger debate has been overlooked until quite recently. The confusion is understandable. Elias frequently distanced himself from philosophy – again, the field in which he received his doctorate – as he struggled to find a foothold and gain the recognition he deserved as a sociologist first in Germany and later in England. Certainly when he wrote his greatest book, in the 1930s while still in his thirties, this German émigré from a Jewish family was not about to broadcast the degree to which his research was informed by proto-sociological thinking involving the radical ontological critique of Cartesian and Kantian ego-based subjectivism associated, most obviously, with a Nazi.
Nevertheless, as Kilminster (2007) reveals, along with other advanced philosophy students including his friend, Hannah Arendt, Elias was certainly knowledgeable about the debates in question. 5 Kilminster’s careful efforts recently have been buttressed by Adrian Jitschin’s as-yet unpublished discovery, made while working in the archive of Freiburg University in 2012, that both Elias and Heidegger participated in a seminar (‘Seminar über Erscheinung und Sinn bei’) offered by Husserl in 1920. 6
Whether one sees this as a smoking gun or not, there can be little doubt that, as Kilminster details, Elias’s time-based approach to the fundamental interdependence of porous beings absorbed into, and at once producing and produced by, evolving overall ‘(network) figurations’ or ‘webs’ was largely inspired by the ideas – making the rounds long before the publication of Being and Time – eventually crystallized in Heidegger’s temporally oriented notion of being-in-the-world. To be sure, there were other possible sources of Elias’s radically relational and processual approach, including Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Wittgenstein, and one of his distant relatives, Ernst Cassirer. But, as we further establish below, as a graduate student in his mid-twenties, Elias must have been deeply influenced by witnessing the two most influential Continental philosophers of the twentieth century jockeying for limited slots of attentional space (as Collins would have it) in the field and micro-interactional universe they dominated.
Directly in Elias’s case and indirectly (via Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see in a moment) in Foucault’s, our two scholars both seem to have gotten from the intellectual network that charged up the creative energies and focused the attention most obviously of Husserl and Heidegger (cf. Collins 1998: 748–9) the transformational insight that people usually find themselves already fundamentally interwoven with and learning from the concrete situations and ever-changing symbolic and material worlds into which they are thrust. Such worlds, as Heidegger argued, include transient foreground moods as well as murkier yet also fundamental backgrounds of shared assumptions that make immediately visible coping practices intelligible. 7 Extending Dilthey’s and Weber’s work on verstehen in several directions, this student of Husserl argued that our perpetual meaning-making endeavors tend not only to take place beneath the level of explicit thinking but also to be both social through and through and temporally structured. One (Das Man) tends to operate competently in real time and space as a pre-familiarized player at once fully encompassed in the flow of the game and reaching into the future. The notion of a somehow pre-existing, essentially unchanging, self-acting mental substance (or isolated ego) standing outside an external world (to be explicitly contemplated) had, for Heidegger, nothing to do with the phenomenon he studied: the meaning of being. What competent actors encounter in the flow of everyday life is not really ‘out there’ because it is already ‘in here’, already full of previously learned pre-understandings that ‘naturally’ require no explicit mental representations whatsoever. 8
Even more clearly than Husserl, Heidegger demonstrated the centrality of embodiment in processes of deep socialization, meaning making, and everyday coping. Corporeality in real time and space was foundational, for example, to the carpenter’s unfolding relationship to his hammer as well as to the rest of his holistically structured universe. Yet instead of thematizing embodiment, when he discussed the carpenter’s use of his hammer or, for example, our everyday use of doorknobs, Heidegger left this dimension implicit. Compared to Foucault, Elias also left embodiment somewhat implicit, but Elias and Foucault both emphasized the importance of living bodies far more than had Heidegger. We need now to demonstrate what else was behind our two thinkers’ basically shared inclination to recognize – and, to varying degrees, systematically to thematize – the falseness of Descartes’ erroneous (Damasio, 1994) division of the mind–body complex and the importance of somatic (learning) practices.
Clinical practices, traumatic events
During their formative years, both Foucault and Elias were repeatedly exposed to what we might call medical worlds and their clinical practices. Foucault, whose rise to fame came in part with The Birth of the Clinic ([1963] 1973), was a surgeon’s son and the grandson of a local doctor. Foucault’s mother herself was the child of a surgeon; she was unable to pursue her desired medical career because such career paths were not available to women at the time. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that several of Foucault’s major works revolved around medical discourses. More importantly for us, critical interrogations of actual practices in (psychiatric) hospitals served as the early empirical foundations for his later discussions of the dubious interfaces between power, knowledge (e.g., about the ‘science’ of ‘homosexuality’ and other ‘diseases’), and disciplining techniques.
Apparently to satisfy his father, Elias completed the preliminary clinical part of his training program (i.e. the Physikum) as a medical student while also studying what he actually enjoyed, philosophy. Previously, upon finishing secondary school, he had been sent to the Front during World War I to fight on the German side. If Elias had had the occasion as a medical student to observe the living and the dead, the healthy and the ill human body, he could not have avoided observing the horror of corpses mangled in trench warfare and either left to rot or rushed into field hospitals.
Elias spoke freely about the positive side of these experiences. In one interview on his personal life (1994b: 31), he remarked that ‘long marches …with my pack, doing drill on the parade ground, cleaning shoes, standing to attention – [the] constant pressure to do things’ as a soldier had helped him develop the capacity to ‘work very hard on [his] own’ as a student of medicine and philosophy. When Elias (1994b: 31) was asked if the study of medicine had had an impact on his thinking, his response was:
Yes, a very great impact … You see, sociologists who have not studied medicine speak of society without relating it to the biological aspects of human beings, and I think this is wrong … In my view, if you develop a theory about human action, let us say, you also have to know how the organism is built and how it functions.
Foucault also felt the impact of traumas related to intentional injury and death. He attempted suicide multiple times, starting in 1948. Repeatedly, he wrote and spoke in interviews (at times encouragingly) about suicide even into the 1970s and 1980s (Miller, 1993: 54–6). This brings us, quite obviously in Foucault’s case, to traumatic stress related to the ‘scientific’ discourse on the ‘pathology’ known as homosexuality. 10 We need not take at face value the often-heard claims that his first suicide attempt resulted simply from Foucault’s struggle to come to terms with his putatively ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. As James Miller (1993: 55–6) recalls, as a young man in the City of Lights, Foucault reported feeling excitement about participating in shadowy scenes centering around forbidden bodily pleasures. It might, however, be fair to concede, as Miller does, that ‘to be young and gay was no simple thing in the Paris of the late 1940s’. Here one might add that, as Miller documents, years before Foucault’s immersion in the elite Left Bank world of comparatively progressive Normaliens, and while still in his native, provincial, and less open-minded Poitiers, he was keenly aware of being attracted to members of his own sex.
Traumatic or not, then, both Elias and Foucault were marked by profound experiences related both to clinical practices and to intentional physical injury (leading to death). This almost assuredly resulted in similarly practical senses of the centrality of actual human bodies of flesh and blood. In other words, we have every reason to assume that their intensely emotional memories related to indivisibly mental and somatic experiences help explain these two radically relational thinkers’ extraordinary sensitivity to the fleeting and fragile yet also pervasive bodily Unterbau of all social and institutional life – even in cases in which, adopting Husserl’s ‘natural attitude’, people mutually constituting various worlds do not ‘see’ the profundity of actual modes of embodiment any more than fish see water.
Having said this, the fact that Foucault was more explicit about the body begs questions about a vital resource that he had and that Elias did not: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While Jean-Paul Sartre remained in Husserl’s cogito-based tradition, Merleau-Ponty – like Heidegger – most certainly sought to depart from it. And, as Collins’s (1998: 740) network analysis suggests, Foucault probably was more influenced by Merleau-Ponty than by any other mentor. Certainly Foucault was deeply impressed by Merleau-Ponty’s extensions of Heidegger, in which Merleau-Ponty attacked overly cognitivist (or mentalist) approaches to heat-of-the-moment perception and action and focused on the pre-discursive experience of having one’s flesh in the game (and not being able to call time out). Merleau-Ponty’s key notion was that the phenomenologically lived body already is engaged in skillful navigation of social settings. In the lived body, he argued, we find the hidden origins of perceptions, practical reasoning, competence, and even coping ‘strategies’ that do not require an ‘I think’ (i.e., a ‘strategist’ in the conventional sense of the term). The lived body, we can now say, is precisely that which was left implicit in Heidegger’s account and that which our two ‘clinicians’, dealing with traumatic memories lodged in their whole beings, were forced to keep in mind. It is the true source of our primordial senses of self, the fountainhead of our feelings for what goes on around us, and the spring of our pre-conceptual ‘understanding’ of who we are and how we should conduct ourselves. Foucault was explicit about the theoretical importance of lived bodies because this Heideggarian mentor, this ‘philosopher of the flesh’, helped him to see it.
Visceral discovery
Assuming that our two theorists’ general approaches to disciplining/civilizing as well as these wellsprings of creativity can be kept in mind, let us turn briefly to Foucault’s, and then to Elias’s, most basic discovery.
Foucault on the embodiment of self-constraint
The author of Discipline and Punish focused his analytic attention on detailed practices or ‘disciplines’ centering on the porous, malleable living bodies of those being ‘trained’, made ‘healthy’, and putatively ‘improved’. He argued that these practices and ‘techniques’ (cf. Mauss, 1973) were what constituted the immediate, non-discursive, background psycho-somatic experiences ensuring both capacities for self-constraint and the intelligibility if not the (illusory) validity of bureaucratic experts’ foreground legitimacy claims. While the administrators of Foucault’s expansive ‘apparatuses’ genuinely believed that they were increasingly ‘reasonable’ technicians of ‘souls’, unbeknown to themselves they were most basically enmeshed in interlocking sets of ‘normalizing’ practices targeting human bodies.
So the secret, Foucault tried to demonstrate, is that the most fundamental dimension of life involved in the shift towards the disciplinary society is not at all shrouded in secrecy. ‘Discipline is a political anatomy of detail’, he declared ([1975] 1979: 139), and once you see how this works – within the bodily structure at the most basic level – you see what players in the heat of the game’s action cannot possibly see. Not only did Foucault claim that the lived body of the competent ‘player’ must remain ‘invisible’ most of the time but, as a Heideggerian, he emphasized that this was so in part because the players had no access to another ‘world’– i.e. no counter-example – that might make ‘visible’ how one’s worldview is based on body-based techniques and the immediate, non-discursive experiences to which they give rise. Even Foucault’s experts themselves already were disciplined by an endless array of familiarized, somatically-focused practices and operational procedures. With regard to institutions like schools as well as prisons, the trick therefore was to problematize the body-based techniques, practices, and experiences that seemed unproblematic because they were ‘naturally’ always already there.
Even when the objects of his later analyses appeared to be specific institutions or institutional domains, these more genealogical studies actually remained concerned with the spread of body-based techniques across the social body. Foucault’s ultimate objectives were spillover effects with a specific directionality. Despite all the open-ended contingencies and all the non-linearity involved in the evolution of the sets of practices he studied, his advance on Weber’s project was to document what at the deepest level was propelling this transformation in a singular direction within a unified order (or emerging structure) of power relations.
The ultimate consequence of the historical shift towards a ‘carceral’ society, Foucault ([1975] 1979: 308) warned, were ‘docile bodies’ and the normalization of techniques and (pseudo) sciences that ‘permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual’. Here we might consider the seeming incongruity between Foucault and Elias. A certain kind of ‘habitus’ (second nature) was the endpoint of Elias’s analysis of the civilizing process from the 1930s on (Paulle et al., 2012). Did Foucault not develop or deploy any such concept?
In addressing this question, it is important to see that the incorporation of predispositions towards the use of (emotional) self-restraint clearly is the final result both Elias and Foucault had in mind. This can best be demonstrated by zooming in on what Foucault ([1975] 1979: 135) actually meant by the production of ‘subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies’. Ultimately, what his most detailed descriptions of moment-by-moment disciplining revealed was the development of ‘automatic’ docility. Of course, this automaticity of socially acquired ‘dispositions’ – a word Foucault and Elias both used in revealing ways – is precisely what the term habitus is meant to capture. And, as Foucault ([1975] 1979: 135–6, 138, 168–9) conveyed in example after example, his discipliners had to ensure that the ‘posture [of the disciplined] is gradually corrected’ and that ‘a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of [their] bod’ – again, a process of development of dispositions.
The practices that received the most empirical and theoretical attention in Foucault’s most famous work were the ones that most effectively ensured that the ‘automatism of habit[s]’ promoting self-restraint would be attained. Even if he never used the term, Foucault’s critique of disciplining 11 was fueled by his apprehension about habitus formation. In clarifying his vision of where disciplining takes us, Foucault gave us the ‘military dream of society … [full of] meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine … [oriented] not to the general will but to automatic docility’. 12 Habitus formation based on techniques of the body, in situations and worlds that only seem to be ‘external’ was for him the end result.
This brings us to what may be a more meaningful difference between the two theorists upon whom we focus. While in his magnum opus and elsewhere, Elias tended to be neutral if not (ultimately) somewhat optimistic about the effects of civilizing, Foucault seemed, in his most influential work on the subject, to be extremely negative about disciplining. Indeed, on empirical and emotional levels, Discipline and Punish often reads as much like a dystopia as does Orwell’s 1984. 13 The final discussion will return to this issue, but only after we take a moment to probe more deeply into Elias’s approach to (implicit) pedagogies engendering self-control.
Elias on the embodiment of self-restraint
Turning now more squarely towards Elias, perhaps it would be useful to begin by taking a step back from his theory of the civilizing process. Before Elias explained in What Is Sociology? what he meant by his main theoretical concept – the social ‘figuration’ – he did something quite revealing. In a subsection entitled ‘Critique of sociological “categories”’, he ([1970] 1978: 113–22) suggested that even Weber, this ‘great sociologist’, this ‘thinker of great insight[,] … never succeeded in solving the problem of the relationship between two basically isolated and static objects seemingly indicated by concepts of the single individual and society’. Central to Weber’s misleading reduction to the ‘separate, completely independent, self-reliant’ or ‘absolute individual’, Elias asserted, was his inability to bring the dimension of time and the reality of continuous change into the core of his analysis. Weber, he charged, remained stuck in an ‘old philosophical argument’ based on the myth that we cannot speak of ‘change unless a Something exists which does not change’. Putting scare quotes around terms like ‘ego’ and the ‘acting individual’, Elias stressed that people are ‘relatively open, interdependent processes’. He emphasized repeatedly that there is no clear barrier separating some ‘real self … with an existence apart from the world outside’.
Elias argued that, thanks to a grand historical learning process that began with elites, 14 the felt sense of self in formally rationalizing Western culture is quickly trained out of each of us and replaced with an illusory self-image. This is why most of us dwell, phenomenologically speaking, in the image of a self in a box. Elias took time to confront us with the degree to which we are out of touch with our non-illusory ways of inter-being to set up the following claim: Achieving distance from our mythical self-image will require rediscovering the immediate, non-discursive experience of our whole and relational selves. The dissociation from subject to object and from mind to body is the result of a habit drilled deep into our unconscious minds over the course of centuries. To help break that habit, in his late sixties and at the height of his long-postponed fame, Elias challenged his readers to consider the porousness of their own flesh. Only after returning to the whole living body as fundamental source of knowledge about the fact of perpetual change and the truth of mutual interdependence was this Weberian thinker ready to explain what he meant by the term ‘figuration’.
When Elias ([1970] 1978: 128–34) finally started to clarify his main concept, using as his example four players involved in a card game, he emphasized the ‘interweaving’ and the ‘fluid’ character not just of interdependent people’s ‘intellects’. Such figurations, he argued, were constituted by people’s ‘whole beings’, the totality of their ‘affective bonds’ and their (in)actions. He used the example of a soccer match. Crucially, to demonstrate that the ‘fluctuating balance of power’ in the match was a ‘structural characteristic of the flow of every figuration’, Elias focused on a clearly body-centered practice. 15 From here, he literally fleshed out his key concept by referring to the configurations (of power) formed by a teacher and students, the guests in a restaurant at their favorite table, and the children in a kindergarten class. Trying to convince the reader of the importance of an insight clearly meant to escape the subject/object and internal/external dichotomies, he focused time and again on forms of bodily co-presence that generate, and require, high degrees of emotional self-restraint.
Taking together these vital contributions of What Is Sociology?, we grasp better than anywhere else that non-discursive body-based learning (about the shamefulness of a self that is not ‘cut off’) was, for Elias, fundamental to the social constraints towards self-discipline process. 16
With this we return to The Civilizing Process. Throughout the first volume of this book, ‘The History of Manners’, the reader is confronted with details about blowing one’s nose, spitting, behavior in the bedroom, the eating of meat, and the ‘natural functions’ more generally. Presaging the work of Mary Douglas, a striking amount of attention is given to behavioral standards and prescriptions surrounding moments when substances go into or come out of the body. In passage after passage, Elias used abundant sources to record how behavioral prescriptions and thresholds of shame gradually shifted in the same ‘civilizing’ direction due, most immediately, to the effects of pedagogies based on the living human body and its perilously vague demarcations.
Elias drew extensively from etiquette books, which, over the course of centuries, grew increasingly stringent. Perhaps most revealing, at least with regard to the actual learning process at the heart of the socio-historical trend he uncovered, was his analysis of a treatise by Erasmus (On Civility in Children), published in 1530. As Elias ([1939] 1994: 44) explained, Erasmus’s book only seems to be about outward bodily propriety:
Bodily carriage, gestures, dress, facial expressions, this outward behavior with which the treatise concerns itself is the expression of the inner, the whole man … In the first chapter [Erasmus] treats ‘the seemly and unseemly condition of the whole body’, in the second, ‘bodily culture’, in the third, ‘manners at holy places’… and [last but not least], the bedchamber.
These paragraphs therefore only superficially were about the conscious learning involved in, say, the increasing use of utensils or toilets. Elias’s detailed analysis of shifting standards of behavior demonstrated that once a set of dispositions has been altered through concentrated attention, the newly acquired dispositions operate unreflectively, most of the time, in order to allow consciousness to attend to other tasks. Furthermore, Elias’s close-up investigation of the learning process in question demonstrated that by far the most efficient way to bring about more restrained habits was to temporarily bring into conscious awareness modes of somatic functioning and associated feelings (such as shame most importantly 18 ) so that one could learn – in situ and in vivo – to identify subtle differences in ways of carrying oneself or moving while also monitoring both the (social) value of coordinated mind–body functions and their pre-discursive affectivity.
Elias knew that his meticulous descriptions of changing habituated response patterns would force readers to consider why, for instance, at a dinner party, most of us would no more consider ripping off the leg of a turkey and eating it with our hands than we would contemplate urinating in the corner. While normal (even) in elite circles during the late Middle Ages, getting caught doing or even witnessing this would for most of us be the shameful or repulsive stuff of a nightmare – not something that would even show up as an option in our contemporary lifeworlds. Elias demonstrated that all the way down to our unconscious minds – and specifically to the relations between our unconscious mental structures and our bodily cores – we are not just thoroughly social but also part of a grand historical transformation. To see the manners they or we were forced to learn and take for granted – or the emotional dispositions they or we were forced to incorporate – as somehow ‘separate’ from ‘external’ figurational dynamics would be to miss the point.
The deeper message of the first volume of The Civilizing Process, then, was this: over a long period of time, psycho-somatic practices have evolved in a singular direction. And just as in Discipline and Punish, the main pedagogic devices being used to push action along are situated beings of flesh and blood. Elias went into such great detail to describe how new standards of behavior (and thresholds of shame) took root precisely because he wanted to show how (emotional) self-control literally was embodied.
Elias certainly saw that the process he investigated could leave scars– both metaphorical and literal. Nonetheless, he ([1939] 1994: 445–56) argued that, individually and collectively, we generally stand to gain from the social constraints to self-discipline process. Elias concluded, that is, that the more emotionally restrained, flexible, and discerning habitus required for even a chance of success and well-being among aristocrats in Louis XIV’s court – or, for example, among Jews in Germany in the 1930s – is the generally positive effect of a centuries-old learning process that always has been aimed at (young) peoples’ bodily cores.
Final discussion
All the way down at the bedrock level, and most importantly in The Civilizing Process and Discipline and Punish, both Elias and Foucault discovered the visceral foundations of the social constraints to the self-discipline process. They showed that this primordial process has for centuries been – and almost certainly will continue to be – at the root of broader transformations characterized by pacification and aggression, liberation and bondage.
We have demonstrated that in Elias’s case as well as in Foucault’s, this discovery must be traced back at least in part to Heidegger’s break from Husserl (and Merleau-Ponty’s systemic explication of what this meant). We also have shown that this discovery was enabled by Elias’s and Foucault’s sustained exposure to clinical practices and traumatic experiences involving intentional injury and death.
In terms of the Weberian project to which they both contributed, Elias and Foucault’s shared discovery is about the subjective developments that paved the way for rationalization in its objective form. To be sure, Elias and Foucault agreed with Weber that the social forces promoting greater levels of self-control and calculated foresight were basic to the rationalizing transformation into (early) modernity. But pace Weber, they found that the collective learning process through which self-control was spread operates most basically beneath the level of explicit ideas and interpretations. As this article has shown, Elias and Foucault both saw that, at the most primordial level, what actually fueled and gave directionality to the historical transition in question were sets of concrete practices powerful enough to produce deep-seated and increasingly self-restrained dispositions precisely because they target – and operate most basically on the level of – non-discursive somatic experience. Not only was the ‘prior’ development in question not founded on (originally religious) ideas but, Elias and Foucault revealed, in the cases of princes and paupers alike it was based on learning practices and micro-interactional techniques that usually require no more interpretation than maintaining balance on a bike. In advancing on Weber in their greatest works, Elias and Foucault revealed the following about Europe’s transition from the late Middle Ages to (early) modernity: the social constraints to self-discipline process at the heart of it all spread so effectively both down from the upper echelons and up from the subterranean bowels of institutions governing the poor because it always was founded – for better and for worse – on socially absorbed beings of flesh and blood.
Having shown what enabled Elias and Foucault to make their great advance on Weber, we now are in a position to return to what may seem their most irreconcilable differences. While Elias saw that the social constraints towards self-discipline process had a dark side, he tended to emphasize how it promotes putatively ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ peace, emotional stability, mental flexibility, and overall well-being. Although Foucault at times showed that the social constraints toward self-constraint process had what might be called positive effects, he tended to associate it with unremitting and even warlike domination grounded in everyday institutional practices and dubious scientific claims.
This difference, we now can see, had in part to do with their being confronted with different types of traumatic experiences. The main source of traumatic stress in Foucault’s early life was the ‘medicalization’ of homosexuality and its treatment as a psychopathology ‘naturally’ calling for ‘normalization’. In his most famous book, the social constraints toward self-constraint process at the heart of the broader shift to a ‘carceral society’ remained, above all, for this son of a medical family, dangerous. His Weber, especially in Discipline and Punish, was the one who ranted about calculating, spiritless, and heartless bureaucratic experts plunging all of us further into the ‘icy waters’ of formal rationalization. This explains Foucault’s most important empirical focus, from below, on evolving ‘correctional’ regimes used to observe and torture the poor.
By contrast, Elias’s trauma had to do with killing and mass murder. More specifically, it had to do with the unspeakable horrors of trench warfare during World War I and, in his ([1989] 1996) analysis, the ‘breakdown of civilization’ caused most immediately by the German state’s inability during the Weimar Republic to regulate the bands of paramilitary thugs whose terror contributed to the rise of the National Socialists and, ultimately, to the annihilation of millions – his mother among them. Here we come upon an interesting question. After being exposed to so much state-led violence, and especially after World War II, why did Elias – unlike Foucault – remain so positive about the institutionalized power of the state? Why did he focus so intently on topics such as the courtly socialization of nobles descended from barbaric warriors in genteel places like the pre-revolutionary palaces of Versailles? Whence the comparative optimism? The description Elias ([1939] 1994: 46–7) offered of a speech by Hitler he attended in Frankfurt is instructive. ‘Burning with curiosity’, in either late 1932 or early 1933, Elias went to this gathering even though he was concerned about being ‘recognizable as a Jew’. Elias disguised himself as an aristocrat and made sure to be accompanied by two ‘towering, very Aryan-looking students’ because, he said, if someone called him out – ‘Look, a Jew!’ – he almost assuredly would have been thrashed by a mob. Elias reported that, although the Führer kept the ‘excited’ crowd waiting for around two hours, they remained ‘wildly excited’ (‘wildenthousiast’ in the original Dutch version of this interview (Heerma van Voss and Van Stolk, 1987: 55) while, for example, singing patriotic songs. He recalled that Hitler ‘blessed the children at the end …. He laid his hands on their heads and talked to them. And the crowd roared with enthusiasm.’
The reversal into ‘barbarism’ culminating in mass murder of the Jews was, for Elias, an expression of an intensely irrational collective fantasy growing out of racist Nazi ideology. Nazism was the ideology of violent thugs who should have been pacified and neutralized by the rule of law. It was not an ideology even vaguely related to the rational political interests or war objectives of the state. A strong state would have enforced its monopoly on the use of legitimate physical violence to crush paramilitary units such as the Freikorps and their collective emotion-generating rituals long before violence, intimidation, and arguably the most infamous election in human history brought Hitler to power. Elias saw the defining events of his life as what happens when a state is too weak rather than too strong – that is, when it fails to regulate the physical violence of brutes taking over the political realm.
The Janus-faced character of rationalization in its objective form can be found, then, in these two Weberian scholars’ attempts to get beneath it. We should pragmatically combine the unique strengths of Elias’s more top-down and perhaps at times overly optimistic vision with those of Foucault’s famously critical view from below. Especially in highly differentiated societies that require increasing amounts of (emotional) self-control (Moffitt et al., 2011), turning the underlying compatibility of Elias and Foucault into the foundation of a properly social-scientific, relentlessly relational, and thoroughly incarnated framework may represent the best way for us to investigate – and contribute to dealing with – the traumatic stress caused by our inability to adequately equip large numbers of (young) people for modern life.