The Civilizing Process

Donna Haraway has already done it in one way. In talking of situ­ated knowledges, and locating objectivity precisely in the specifici­ties of embodiment, she has offered a particular account of the truth regimes that perform the disembodiment that is normatively required in the modern project. These knowledges belong to what she calls ‘‘unmarked subjects,’’ unmarked subjects that turn out to be predomi­nantly wealthy, white, and male. But there are other ways of doing it, other deconstructive stories to tell, not to contradict those of Har – away, but rather to thicken the textures of alternative modes of story­telling, alternative understandings of the specificities of embodiment.

So here is another story from social theory or social history.

When I think of the construction of ‘‘the personal,’’ I think immedi­ately of Norbert Elias’s work on ‘‘the civilizing process’’ (1978,1983). It may be that the term itself is not well chosen and that he overgeneral­izes, for certainly at times his history seems, well, somewhat mythic. It may also be that he underestimates the horrors produced by ‘‘civili­zation.’’12 But does this matter? The answer right now is no, it doesn’t. This is because Elias’s position is generally deconstructive. It anato­mizes the personal and that is what is important here.

Elias says that as the centuries unfold in Western Europe from the late Middle Ages onward, the barrier between the inside and the out­side, between the ‘‘personal’’ and the ‘‘public’’ grows. Table manners, bodily functions, the expression of emotions: in the Middle Ages none of these were particularly restrained by comparison with what was to come later. Gradually, he argues, the body and its emotions were concealed behind a wall of politeness, civility, restraint, and repression, and that which was previously visible became private, invisible, inappropriate, unwise. Turned into a matter of no public interest the body became, as we say, ‘‘personal.’’

Elias has a story about how this came about: he says that in times of uncertainty and famine people make the most of the moment. There isn’t much point, as I say to my students, in studying for a degree if you know you’re going to die of starvation before the end of the year. But this situation prevailed in most, perhaps all, contexts dur­ing much of the European Middle Ages. On the other hand, if life is a little more stable—if you think you know where the next meal and the meal after that are coming from—then thinking strategically starts to make sense: thinking and acting long term and not on the spur of the moment. Which means that there is need for repression, calculation, and concealment of one kind or another. This is the point at which di­viding the public from the private starts to make sense, for strategy— or so it can be argued—is impossible without concealment.

Elias moves almost imperceptibly between the ‘‘social’’ and the ‘‘personal,’’ for in his way of thinking the distinction doesn’t make much sense. If people are more calculative because the world is not quite so unpredictable, then this has consequences. It tends to in­crease the level of predictability yet again, which sets up a virtuous cycle. Stable social life and long-term calculation tend to reinforce one another. This virtuous cycle expresses itself through a range of materialities: the body and its concealments; individual interaction; but also the organization of economic life (a surplus is more likely if social life is calm, but the existence of surplus itself renders social life more predictable); and the organization of the state (which secures a monopoly over the unpredictability performed by violence and there­fore, perhaps, secures peace). This is Elias’s argument: European his­tory from the Middle Ages onward may be understood, overall, as a virtuous cycle.

Gordon Fyfe suggests that Norbert Elias combines Sigmund Freud with Max Weber, repression with rationalization. This sounds right. What Elias tells us is, to be sure, only a story. Other stories might be and indeed are told. But if our concern is with the archaeology of the personal then it is an interesting story because it tells how what we call the ‘‘personal’’ might have been brought into being and tells, or at any rate implies, that it could be otherwise. And, most of all, Elias’s story is interesting because it insists that if we want to understand social life, then we need to attend both to the personal and to the social. Or no: that gives too much away. It suggests that the distinction between the personal and the social is analytically irrelevant.

So what I have told about the events at RAF Cosford in 1985 is a personal story because it is located and makes no particular attempt to perform itself outside time and space, in the eternity depicted by David Bailly in his vanitas. I have, I hope, neither pulled any particu­lar god-trick nor tried to perform myself as an unmarked subject. But that story also makes me uneasy. No, better, therefore it also makes me uneasy. I think this is because I (and no doubt in some measure many readers) perform the distinction between truth and person, be­tween outside and inside. For most Euro-Americans are the children of Elias’s “civilizing process,’’ which means that if we write about ‘‘ourselves’’ then we are sailing close to that divide, the divide that is breached by vanity ethnography or plain, downright self-indulgence. Which is, I think, one of the objections to ‘‘reflexive sociology’’—one of the reasons that it has not achieved the attention that it no doubt deserves.

Perhaps, then, you are tempted to say: ‘‘That’s enough of John Law. Enough of the ethnographer. Let’s get to the facts! What about the aircraft?’’ Well, surely this is the issue that we need to confront and deconstruct.