Apr 04 2006
Book Review: The Civilizing Process
p163: What ought to be done with prisoners? … With regard to those who could pay or who were members of one’s own class, one exercised some degree of restraint. But the others? To keep them meant to feed them. To return them meant to enhance the walth and fighting power of the enemy. .. So prisoners were killed or sent back so mutilated that they were unfitted for war or work.
Was it Hobsbam who said the V gesture was not because of “Victory”. Rather it was archers returned from enemy camp who used it to signal their coming in re-usable shape.
The study of attitudes toward aggression and violence. p161
Influced by structural reality of power: whether there is centralized state with monopoly power or not. ” But even those temporarl or spatial enclaves within civilized society in which aggressiveness is allowed freer play–above all, wars between nations–have become more impersonal.” p170
Touching as a child’s natural experssion of aggression? Sports as outlet of aggression. Spectator sport like that of public cat burning in Paris in the 16th. p170-171
“anxiety installed as self-control” p172
Universities and courts as different source of model behaviors for the society (gentrifing process, the Impressionists and John Singer Sargen) p189
Civilizing process NOT as a result of rational planning p365
The civilizing process and Hegel’s Spirit of a nation p366 (Meta-culture? What produce individual acts of cultural manifestation)
Interwining, mutual dependence of people … p366 (??) “This whole reorganization of human relationships certainly had direct significance for the change in the human habitus, the provisional result of which is our form of “civilized” conduct and feelings.
Social functions become more differentiated under the pressure of competition p367
Self-control plus a functioning apparatus of self-control … A wall of deep-rooted fears p368
Traffic police only works if people maintain their self-control. ibid
As the social fabric grows more intricate, the sociogenic apparatus of individual self-control also becomes more differentiated, more all-round and more stable. p369
Only highly centralized, monopolized physical power would induce “second nature” ibid
Societies without a stable monopoly of force are always societies in which the division of functios is relatively slight… the moderation of … emotions, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into the past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of chains of cause and effect. p370
On knights becomes coutiers: warriors instant gratification, savege joys, but exposed to an extraodinary degree violence and passion of others. When violence is monopolized … it no longer depends so directly on momentary affects. p371
The greater spontaneity of drives and the higher measure of physical threat … are complementary. ibid
Danger is more “calculable”. Compared to medival time when “both joy and pain were discharged more openly and freely” p372/4
At the same time, the battlefield is moved within–”super-ego”. 375
Self-controls … call them “reason” or “conscience”, “ego” or “super-ego” p377
Comments:
Migdal said it was a reflection of state formation. With concentration and labor division–politicizing, there formed special codes of conduct.
Agree:
Elias is really farsighted in post-structural study of human behavior–eye openning.
An able study provides footnotes of the super-ego concept.
Questions:
Codes of conduct consist behavioral and cognitive: behavioral makes up the ritualistic (bowing in Japan, footbinding in China, local hand gestures, etc.) and custom part of “culture”. Cognitive makes up the value system part.
Therefore, blowing nose and spitting are behavioral, harmless, BF Skinner kind of phenomenon: not necessarily related to state formation.
Aversion to violence (concern of violence seems to be the underlying anxiety throughout the book), on the other hand, is cognitive: parents forbids kids of touching strangers, for example: a vivid case of pacification and monopolization of violence (hence Weber).