Norbert Elias and Empirical Research

T. Landini, F. Dépelteau, T. Landini, F. Dépelteau

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137312136
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312143
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Norbert Elias has been recognized as one of the key social scientists of the 20th century at least in sociology, political science and history. This book will address Norbert Elias's approach to empirical research, the use of his work in empirical research, and compare him with other theorists.

Chapter 1

Therapeutic Culture and Self-Help Literature: The “Positive Psychology Code”

Helena Béjar

1.

The present chapter is on the sociology of culture. In it, I make use of the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process. In the first part of The Civilizing Process, Elias analyzed the major European manner books. These were meant to teach courtly behavior to an aristocracy that was leaving war behind as a way of life and becoming a part of the court configuration. Throughout this massive political, social, and cultural change, the new aristocracy was required to tame its impulses and to reduce its violent behavior. (In the second part of Elias’s work, and of secondary interest for my analysis, he elaborated a theory of the formation of the modern state.) One of Elias’s theses was that the civilizing process entails the development and differentiation of ties of interdependence between people. The development of this interdependence marks the civilization direction from heterocontrol (in which people control their behavior through the presence of others) to self-control (in which people internalize their social constraints).

I argue that late modernity is witnessing today a new stage in the civilizing process—that is, individualization, which has its own conduct manuals. In these guides interdependence, which constitutes the backbone of sociability, is replaced by the values of independence and self-sufficiency. This transformation of values is part of the progress of therapeutic culture, a manifestation of which can be found in the popularity of self-help books. I also argue that advice literature, and especially the self-help genre, constitutes the functional equivalent and has a similar cultural meaning to the literature that Elias studied (Wouters 1995; 1998; 2007). European manuals were designed to dictate behavior in the domestic and the private sphere, such as at the table and in bed (i.e, the code of civilité), and in the public domain of the court, i.e., the code of politesse). Likewise, what I call the “psychological code” is meant to prevail within the inner domain of identity (Béjar 1992).

Every code of conduct has an argument that provides justification for why people have to change public behavior in the new social configuration of the court. On the one hand, the codes of civilité and that of politesse had a social argument that explained the necessity of self-control in the presence of others. By contrast, the psychological code replaces the social argument by a self-referential narrative that teaches one how to build a strong personal identity. The psychological code stresses introspection and brackets the social world. Both the ideal and the practice of a good life are not any longer moral but psychological (Rose, 1990). Psychology is defining the new ethical fabric of late modernity. This is connected with the cultural spreading of emotivism (MacIntyre 1982), which should be understood not so much as an ethical theory but as a worldview that puts feelings and wishes at the center of individual action and moral reasoning. An emotivistic culture has a thin and contingent perspective of morality. I also argue that the rules of the psychological code are creating a new form of cultural conformism. Those rules imply a psychological governmentality that dictates how we must feel, how we must relate to others, how we must perceive ourselves in order to comply with the narrative of a healthy and balanced self.

This chapter has two parts. The first one is primarily descriptive, and presents critically and briefly the most important sociological works on etiquette and advice books. My aim is mainly to review the theoretical frame of therapeutic culture in order to claim that it is a legitimate object of sociological research. I review four authors: firstly, Cas Wouters and his analysis of etiquette books; secondly, Arlie Russell Hochschild and her perspective on self-help books as texts that deal with norms of caring; thirdly, Nikolas Rose and his disciplinary approach for which both scientific and popular psychology shape a new techne; and lastly, Eva Illouz and her pragmatist interest in how advice literature may be a cultural resource for individuals in late modernity.

The second part is more interpretive. I analyze some of the books of Bernabé Tierno, a psychologist from Spain who claims to be a representative of what I call the “positive psychology code” which has been very influential in recent years, not only in the self-help genre but also in the most important popular psychology journals, Psychology Today (in the United States) and Psychologies (in France and Spain).¹ I have chosen Bernabé Tierno because his works, all of them bestsellers in the self-help genre, are openly evaluative. Tierno makes possible a rich analysis of the idea both of the canon of the self and the personal ties in contemporary therapeutic culture. He presents his works explicitly as advice books that contain guides of conduct, both for the care of the self and for personal relationships. His openly normative tone is not often found among the authors of self-help literature, who claim generally to be scientific and therefore try to avoid explicit advice and moral judgments. (This is the case with Castanyer 2004 and Alava Reyes 2007, in the production of this genre in Spain.) On the contrary, Tierno expresses a very transparent and extreme version of what I call the “positive psychology code.” Thus, Bernabé Tierno’s texts are a case in point of an advice literature that highlights the current perspective of the psychological worldview.

2.

The civilizing process runs parallel both to the building of the modern state and to individualization. Individualization is seen as a late-modern development, and it engenders a subject characterized by hyperrationality. Anthony Giddens depicts this subject in his analysis of a type of intimacy made up of “pure relationships” and “confluent love” (Giddens 1995, 1997). According to him, individuals in late modernity are autonomous electors who choose, from a “menu of options,” how to manage their lives. A democratic intimacy that is continually negotiated and challenging is a crucial part of this view of life, which brings with it a reflexive and belabored self. From a less optimistic perspective, individualization may be understood as the cultural frame of personal anomic relationships that increase moral chaos and uncertainty (Beck and Gernstein 2004; 2001). Finally individualization is the core of what Bauman calls “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2001; 2002; 2005). (I mention only the most important works on intimacy in contemporary sociology.) In liquid modernity, men and women are forced to become aware of the uncertainty of their futures in all fields, mainly in the spheres of love and work. They are also compelled to accept that this contingency is inevitable. In contrast to Giddens’s optimism, Bauman claims that rationality and reflexivity are impotent tools for the contemporary individual. Whereas solid modernity anchored men and women in durable institutions that helped define personal goals, liquid modernity creates individuals disembedded from institutions and alone with their worries. At the same time, liquid society dictates that they ought to be able to control their future and “to surf” the present. From different theoretical perspectives, all these authors point to the cultural imperative of an individual as a rational decision maker who has to design his or her life by choosing from a menu of options among a variety of lifestyles.

In the context of individualization, therapeutic culture thrives, both in its scientific and in its popular versions. Self-help literature deals with the ideal of the self and the private domain, and it shapes rules regarding feelings and appropriate conduct. Thus, they elaborate on the emotional management of worry, loss, and grief, as well as on correct behavior in the private and the public arenas. This is why such texts constitute a key source to study the affective economy of our times.

There are four main authors who have studied manuals of conduct. Cas Wouters analyzes etiquette books within “the informalization process” (Wouters 1995; 2001; 2007)—that is, the constraint to become informalized in interactions. The decreasing of rigidity in manners in everyday life—such as introductions, the use of first names, and the “social kiss”—is intimately tied with the ongoing process of democratization. Wouters stresses the tendency in the etiquette books genre to skip the social markers, especially the status of the reader. This is a feature that is common to the self-help genre. Advice literature is directed to all social classes, and Wouters stresses the diminishing of social and psychic distance between individuals. He analyzes how the manuals teach how to be “natural.” In the same vein, informalization demands that one has to be natural and at ease, a mandate that is now considered a social skill. Self-help literature commands, also, the reader to become authentic and positive. Authenticity and optimism are also understood as social abilities, being part of the right psychological capital.

Informalization not only runs parallel to democratization, but also to the contemporary psychologization of behavior. There has been a shift from command as the core of conduct in gender ties and in family relations—between parents and children—to negotiation. The change from command to negotiation in the private sphere shows how the superego, the nucleus of social obedience and guilt, has been replaced by the ego (Kilminster 2008). The progress of the “psychomorphic view” of reality (Sennett 1977) extends the cultural obligation of the presentation of the self, not as much after Goffman but as after Goleman’s indictments of emotional and social intelligences (Goleman 1995; 2006). This psychologization of reality leads to an increasing self-awareness and to a continual reflexivity and self-monitorization.

Wouters argues that emotion management may be a source of personal power and that it shapes the present sense of self-respect. I want to stress that in our times self-respect has changed its nature entirely. The therapeutic culture has translated self-respect into self-esteem, a self-referential concept detached from moral and social anchors.

The second approach to analyzing self-help books is from Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her assumption is that every culture has its own emotional bible, containing a dictionary of the most important terms that define what one should and should not feel. The elements of these frames (Goffman 1974) indicate how we use emotional expression. Hochschild distances herself from an organicistic approach (such as Freud, Darwin, and James adopted) in which emotion is, above all, a biological process ruled by instincts, impulses, and drives and that is notable for a deterministic vision that the past plays over emotional life. Opposed to the organicistic approach, Hochschild embraces the interactional approach (which includes the works of Dewey and Goffman), focusing on the situation and “emotion management.”

From a critical perspective, Hochschild analyzes self-help books representing the current power of psychological experts (Hochschild 2003), who are self-appointed authorities on how modern men and women should feel. Self-help literature belongs to popular psychology. It offers rules on how to feel and act conveniently that work as emotional advisers and “cultural intermediaries” for current norms in everyday life. In this sense, self-help books urge the application of emotional practice and guidelines and invite a person to feel a specific emotion, for example self-confidence. Hochschild theorizes about the construction of “deep acting” (Hochschild 1983), which is intended to generate feelings that become real through controlling an individual’s performance and the ensuing change of feelings. In this regard, self-help books teach us how to create a distant self that controls specific social situations.

Accordingly, in her analyses, she determines whether a text is “warm” (in other words, if it legitimizes a high level of involvement in the needs of others) or “cold” (that is, if it proclaims values such as caution and detachment). Hochschild studies how self-help manuals have gone from valuing trust and care (from parents, from children, from partners) to emphasizing a self-sufficiency that stresses the fact that individuals must make do with limited support. Therefore, advice literature shows the advancement of self-control in new ways. The most important emotional work demands to know how to control fear and vulnerability, as well as the desire to receive comfort (Hochschild 2008; 2012). The chilly tone of texts that teach us how to behave and how to feel proposes a self that must define itself without needs and relate to other selves with similar characteristics—selves without dependencies that are interpreted as baggage and burdens to be done away with. This expresses a survivalist emotional strategy (Lasch 1984), which has an elective affinity to flexible capitalism (Sennett 1999; Boltanski 1999), which itself creates people who must endure instability and uncertainty theorized as inevitable.

Hochschild’s work is very brave because it ridicules feminism that, by insisting on equality, has opened the door to the “commercialization of intimate life.” In other words, the modern woman prepares herself for the calling of having it all (a job, a family, prestige, influence, and emotional support), and by doing so she contributes to the “cold-modern” contents of self-help literature that demands a strong and self-reliant subject. In this critique Hochschild advances Illouz’s theory and is consistent with Beck’s conclusion regarding the pitfalls of modern love.

The third author I am going to highlight is Nikolas Rose, a follower of Michel Foucault and his “disciplinary” approach. Rose takes a position of what he calls an “ethical approach,” following Foucault (Foucault 1987; 198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Introduction
• 1  Therapeutic Culture and Self-Help Literature: The “Positive Psychology Code”
• 2  Elias and Literature: Psychogenesis of Brazil in French Books for Young People
• 3  The Civilization of Capital Punishment in France
• 4  Civilizing and Decivilizing Characteristics of the Contemporary Penal Field
• 5  Jurists, Police, Doctors, and Psychologists: Discussing Sexual Violence in Twentieth-Century Brazil
• 6  Civilizing “Life Itself”: Elias and Foucault
• 7  The New Style: Etiquette during the Exile of the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro (1808–1821)
• 8  Principal Elements of the Ottoman State-Formation Process through an Eliasian Perspective
• 9  The Metamorphoses of the Dacha: Some Processual Thinking
• 10  Revisiting Relations between the Sexes in Sport on the Island of Ireland
• 11  Germany’s Special Path to Where? Elias in the Eurozone
• 12  Norbert Elias and the Enigma of Time
• 13  Comparing Norbert Elias and Mikhail Bakhtin: The History of Laughter and the Civilizing Process
• Notes on Contributors
• Index