On Norbert Elias

Today marks twenty five years since the death of the German historical sociologist Norbert Elias. So far I have only seen that anniversary marked in German-language publications, so I thought I would briefly note it here.

Norbert Elias (via Wikipedia)

For me, Elias has been an inspiration and intellectual companion of sorts for about twenty years. He was one of the main theoretical guideposts for my dissertation, which I started thinking about in the mid-1990s.

I can still remember my dissertation advisor at the University of Maryland recommending in a rather offhand way that I take a look at Elias's main work -- The Civilising Process -- while we were in the early stages of discussing what was then my aim of writing about changing standards of behaviour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with regard to "recklessness".

In the end, I wrote about violence in nineteenth-century England, but Elias -- and the historical and sociological work that he had inspired -- remained important to me, even if I struggled at first with both Elias's ideas and his style of writing. (This is one of the many, many instances in my life where chance meetings and comments have led to life-long interests and even obsessions. Given Elias's emphasis on the unplanned nature of historical development, this seems maybe appropriate.)

Elias's imprint is certainly unmistakable in what resulted, published in 2004 as The Shadow of Our Refinement. (Review)

In my post-doctoral Wanderjahre, I tried to build on this work, exploring ways of combining the essentials of Elias's "figurational sociology" with both cultural history and evolutionary psychology. I think, actually, that I might have been the first person to try in any sustained way to combine all three of these ingredients. It's still relatively rare to see all of them brought together; however, there has been a great deal of increased interest in this kind of combination well beyond the historical field itself thanks not least to the enormous resonance that Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature has received since its publication in 2011. (A book to whose development I'm happy to have made some small contribution.)

I've also had a go at applying Elias to literary violence and civilisation, in an essay on de-civilising themes J.G. Ballard's novels High-Rise and Super-Cannes (published in a remarkable essay collection that resulted from an excellent conference). 

In recent years, my historical research has moved away from the history of violence and crime (to intellectual religious history...it's a long story for another time), so I haven't had much to do with his work directly. (Though one of the figures who plays a role in my current project is Karl Mannheim, with whom Elias worked in Frankfurt in the inter-war period before both were compelled to leave Germany. So some slight connection remains.)

While Elias's ideas are far from uncontroversial among historians of violence (which I've had the mixed pleasure of experiencing first-hand on some occasions), they have in one way or another inspired much of the most important work on violence history over the last thirty years. Of course, like all theoretical systems, Elias's is certainly in need of constant testing, reconsideration and revision.

Still, for me, Elias's work has been important well beyond the academic battlefield. Rather than being something that I simply apply "in my work", his ideas have also helped shape the way I see the world more broadly. Even Elias's meditations on death -- in his book The Loneliness of the Dying -- helped me when I was coming to terms with the death of my mother some years ago.

On the long list of deceased intellectuals from the past with whom I'd like to have had the chance to have dinner, Norbert Elias is at the top. And I can't think of all that many other intellectual influences I had in my 20s that I still have in my 40s.  

Elias himself had a complicated, dramatic and in many ways rather sad life, and he remained very much an outsider in his field until the 1970s, when he was well into what for most scholars counts as retirement. Since then, the process of rediscovering his thought and applying it in new ways has gathered pace.

Looking back, I'm happy to have been involved -- in at least some small way -- with that.


 
 

Doris Lessing: still needed

While it is not really a surprise, it is saddening to hear of the death of Doris Lessing.

It made me recall a blog post by The Wife back in 2007, 'Why We Need Doris Lessing', commenting on Lessing's receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the ambivalent response that this award generated among some sections of Germany's literary intelligentsia.

To wit: 

Reich-Ranicki and Scheck, although at roughly opposite ends of the age spectrum, share membership in the vociferous anti-Lessing league, which always returns, with a persistence that borders on the obsessive, to the same hackneyed and unfounded prejudices from which its members seem to derive carte blanche to go around rubbishing her work at every available opportunity. These prejudices are:

a) Lessing is a bloody feminist.
b) Lessing is not Virginia Woolf.

Having said that, even those who celebrate Lessing seem determined to get her wrong. Among the more defensive responses was an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which opens with the following line: ‘But for a few weak books, Doris Lessing’s biography is flawless – it is all politically correct. The Nobel Prize for Literature appears to be standing in for the Nobel Peace Prize.’

Drivel like this confirms my sneaking suspicion that many journalists are simply not the sharpest tools in the shed. A politically correct biography!? Doris Lessing? A former Rhodesian Marxist who dumped her boring first husband for a German radical, abandoned two small children to go and live it up in London’s literary set and subsequently dabbled in Sufism and Sci-Fi only to spend most of the rest of her life railing against any form of political utopianism from feminism to Islamism?

She then turned to examining Lessing's 2001 novel  The Sweetest Dream, which we both read and enjoyed in 2007.

There is nothing utopian or politically correct about Lessing’s protagonist. Frances is Everywoman, trying to make do in a world of radically different individuals with conflicting interests and expectations, only to realize that, however hard one tries, there will always be plenty of loose ends left over. It’s those with the grand ideas that have it wrong: the café politicos and middle-class feminists wasting precious time making molehills into mountains. Consider Julie, Frances’s right-thinking journalist colleague at The Defender, a leftish daily modeled on The Guardian, who flies into

a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. ‘The shits. The bloody fascist shits.’ When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex – ‘Sorry, gender’ – she quietened into hysterical tears and said, ‘It’s all so bloody unfair’ (226).

Now, how many ‘politically correct’ feminist icons go around smacking the universal sisterhood upside the head with the more irrational bits of their creed? Like Lessing, Frances resists succumbing to ideology, although at the cost of being excluded from much of what is going on.

The rest is also worth your time. 

Farewell, Doris Lessing.

Missing Norm already

Like many other people, I was very saddened last night to learn of the death of Norm Geras.

I was about to write something like 'I didn't know him personally', but then it occurred to me that in some way I did. What I mean is that I only ever communicated with Norm electronically--via our blogs and sometimes through email and Facebook--since we 'met' some time after I started this blog in 2006. (I forget now how it happened: it might have been at about this moment, in August of that year.)

This is worth mentioning, I think, because Norm frequently argued for the value of the internet as a new way of bringing people together. (And his commitment to this medium is remarkable: despite his illness, only a little more than a week ago he posted a list of book recommendations.)

He was himself, certainly, (in the face of much counter-evidence) one of the best arguments for the internet being a good and worthwhile thing. With all the fluctuations in my internet habits over the past 7 years, stopping by normblog was among the most consistent parts of my daily online routine.

And, equally consistently, it was one of the most rewarding. Norm's was a voice of reason and sensibility in a world that is all to often the opposite of these things. It was a pleasure to read his reasoning on many issues, even if I found myself not always convinced. (There are, it occurs to me, all too few people with whom it is a pleasure to disagree.)

But I usually did find myself in agreement with Norm, at least eventually.

I know that, for me, his death creates a particular absence that will be difficult to fill. And that is also a strange thought to have about someone I've never met 'personally'.

Condolences, of course, go above all to his family and closest friends.

But the internet is surely left a poorer place without him.

[UPDATE] Tributes to Norm are being collected and reposted at 'normfest'.

"I think not"

 A striking passage from Iain Banks's last interview:

"I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not."

I think not too.

George Jones, 1931-2013

One of the greats, no longer hurtin'.

Speaking the unspeakable, again

As with events not all that long ago in Newtown, I find myself again haunted by a single sentence that encapsulates, for me, the immediate horror of yesterday's attack on the Boston marathon.

It's at the beginning of an article from the New York Times on the explosions' direct aftermath:

“These runners just finished and they don’t have legs now,” said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine. “So many of them. There are so many people without legs. It’s all blood. There’s blood everywhere. You got bones, fragments. It’s disgusting.”

Had Mr. Bastajian run a few strides slower, as he did in 2011, he might have been among the dozens of victims wounded in Monday’s bomb blasts. Instead, he was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical service of exhausted athletes. “We put tourniquets on,” Mr. Bastajian said. “I tied at least five, six legs with tourniquets.” 

'These runners just finished and they don't have legs now.'

I am, myself, someone for whom running has become a vitally important part of life (though I'd never make a marathon).

This doesn't, of course, give me any special insight into the suffering that has resulted from -- and will continue long after -- yesterday's events.

But I think it, somehow, has heightened my horror even beyond where it would otherwise have been.

Which seems scarcely possible.

RIP Peter Banks

Founding member of Yes and subsequently influential prog-rock guitarist, Peter Banks (1947-2013).

Bruce Sterling on 'prepper graveyards', death and a 'poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain'

At the Well, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky engage in this year's version of their now-traditional 'State of the World conversation/rantfest'.

It's a lengthy conversation (to which more than the two named hosts contribute), but, as in previous years, I find it one of the more readable contributions to the inevitable round of year-end musings.

Sterling, for example, cites a few of the groups that he sees as having had -- all in all -- a good year. You might be surprised (given other verdicts) to find that he includes the Tea Party among these.

I'm not sure that he's right, but I find his reasoning worth considering:

It's always "the worse, the better" with these Trotsky-style fanatics. Every failure, rejection and common-sense setback galvanizes them to new extremes of faith-based ideological weirdness. As someone who hangs out in Europe, I'm used to bizarre political movements, but the Tea Party is truly impressively strange by anybody's standards. Acidheads have had more coherent thinking than these Creationist Randite gold-bar-eating pro-coal zillionaire market fundie people. They lost the American election, but winning one and governing a superpower never seemed to be on their agenda. That hasn't discouraged them, though. They've got ladder notches and fallback positions all the way to the prepper graveyard.

Sterling, who lives in Belgrade, also raises some thoughtful points about what he sees as the differences between 'civil society' and 'social capital':

The Balkans has always been pretty low on "civil society," because most political decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms by angry drunk guys. But in terms of "social capital" they're quite keen on looking after one another. The populace is very polite and considerate, by American standards. Hold-ups, muggings, drive-bys, gang rapes, maniacal outbursts by guys with automatic weapons, they're all practically unheard-of.

The feeling on the streets of Belgrade is vastly calmer and cozier than, say, Los Angeles. By the standards of Belgrade, you'd think that LA was a para-militarized civil war zone, even though LA has got "civil society" like nobody's business.

He also makes some interesting points about death:

I lost a favorite uncle this holiday season. He was elderly and frail, and he had a good life -- a remarkably jolly character, really, the life of many a party -- so it's not a tragic loss, but I find that the grief touches everything I see.

Grief is a worldview all its own. Grief gives reality a lunar glow. It's healthy to be placed in touch with the tragic side of life, the losses that make life's value so clear. It's like winter daylight.

My uncle wouldn't want me to be all upset about his passing, and to tell the truth I'm not "upset," but I am diminished. Changes in the state of the world are marked by absences as well as by novelties. The year 2013 will be the first year of my life that does not contain my uncle.

It'll be different.

Finally, in the course of the discussion, someone brings up the idea of art as a (socially) transformative activity; Sterling admits admiring the 'very bohemian approach' and 'cool notion' of the artist as this 'the mental-liberationist Greek trickster figure who steals most of his material', but he sees it nevertheless as limiting, which inspires some thoughts on Montenegrin literature:

That's why I enjoy art such as Petar Njegos' epic of early Montenegrin literature, "The Mountain Wreath."
http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html

Here we've got this very intelligent and determined hillbilly aristocrat, a poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain, out of a half-forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire. His people are pre-literate; he's one of the first to read and write his own language.

This poem, the "Mountain Wreath," is mostly about tribal patriarchs flying into a righteous rage and cutting each other's heads off. It's very like the Iliad in that way; it's full of noble perorations that are mostly along the line of, "Rascal, you've done something unbearable for years now, and I was constrained to get involved in this awful mess you've created; but this time it's personal. So, prepare yourself: I'm taking your head, your pistols, your horses and all your women, and I may even burn your farm." In the context of this artwork, it's certainly the right thing to do. It's the definitive thing to do; it's how you know you're alive.

Then you compare that artwork -- written by an aristocrat, an authority figure in deadly moral earnest -- to this kind of ontological-trickster writing, this kind of "What is Reality, Mr Njegos," postmodern gendankenexperiment, of which me and my sci-fi colleagues are so enduringly fond... Well, keen as I am to write that stuff, it can seem like pretty thin soup.'

And...

Brian Aldiss once told me that science fiction was full of guys who would write about Martians without ever visiting Indonesia. But visiting Indonesia is one thing -- if you actually *hang out* within Indonesia, you *become* Indonesian. You don't visit it, or steal it, you are it.

You have to get past the stark fact that Njegos is an Ottoman Christian-sect hillbilly on horseback who knocks people down with spiked clubs and cuts their heads off as trophies. He is, but he's also a great poet. Njegos even has a wry sense of humor; it's just not what Americans would consider "wry" or even "humor." When you understand his jokes, when you know they're genuinely funny, that's a bigger mental yoga-stretch than we're supposed to allow ourselves within the USA; it makes a "galaxy far far away" look like a Hollywood backlot in Southern California. Which is what it is, pretty much.

Speaking the unspeakable

'Unspeakable violence' is a well worn phrase, and, clearly, there is an extent to which certain violent acts prove to be difficult, if not impossible, to entirely put into words.

However, while never capable of complete expression, there are some moments when violence becomes, if you will, 'speakable': when words allow certain aspects of it to be driven home with a particular emotional intensity.

I found, today, in looking through various kinds of press coverage of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, that the two comments that made the horror of this particular incident of horrendous violence most speakable were not those deliberately aiming at the highest degree of pathos but rather those that seemed most matter of fact or spontaneous.

Both were in the same article, at the Washington Post.

First, the comments from the state medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II:

Carver described the children’s injuries, which he said ranged from at least two to 11 bullet wounds apiece.

He had performed seven of the autopsies himself. A reporter asked what the children had been wearing.

“They’re wearing cute kid stuff,” Carver said. “I mean, they’re first-graders.”

Second, though more significantly in some ways, I was struck by the comment of Rabbi Shaul Praver, whose congregation included one of the first grade victims:

“His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.”

Reconsider that, just a bit longer: 'His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.'

I wish, in some way, that I could un-read those words, as they have been echoing in my brain all day.

But, to my mind, there is something in Rabbi Praver's words that prove that the unspeakable can indeed be spoken.

'A photograph of a summer's day, a little boy's lifetime away'

I see that it's Father's Day back in the US (and in other parts of the world, though not here in Germany), and, without wanting to be a downer or anything, it occurred to me that this year will mark 25 years since my own father died.

Can it really be that many years?

Which led me to taking a long look at this photo, taken probably in 1971, of us together in the driveway of one of those various places I still think of as 'home'.

Which led me to this song.

Goodbye Hitch

I was preoccupied with other things when I heard of Christopher Hitchens's death last Friday, and, while it was far from unexpected, thinking about that event provokes a kind of blue funk that will keep me from writing all but the most cursory of notes.

But I feel that I should say something.

First, if there was one writer and essayist who has by turns intrigued, influenced, inspired and infuriated me since my days as a rather earnestly 'political' teenager in the mid-1980s, it was he. I didn't always agree with his conclusions; however, I found that even -- perhaps especially -- at those times, it was worthwhile engaging with his arguments: if I remained unconvinced, I at least had to think much harder about why that was so.

I'd like to think that what I lost in terms of comfortable self-righteousness I gained with regard to rigorous self-criticism.

Second, I had the pleasure of not only making his acquaintance but also, in what now seems like an episode from another world, of enjoying his (and his wife's) hospitality at their home in Washington, DC. Despite his rather formidable public persona, Christopher, I learned first-hand, was in no way short of warmth, humour and generosity. He recalled that dinner when I wrote him not long ago to express my dismay at his illness.

That will all remain a very fond memory.

But I'm going to miss reading his views and hearing his voice.

Ian McEwan's farewell is well worth reading, as are the others gathered or mentioned by Norm and Terry.

Memory of an old friend

A friend and former fellow student at Northern Illinois University wrote to me today to remind me that it is the tenth anniversary of the death of one of the most directly influential figures in what we might somewhat grandly call my academic development: Professor Marvin S. Rosen.

Some background on him is provided by this old article from an NIU newsletter. NIU now offers a small undergraduate award in his honour.

As often happens, the one-sentence email brings back nearly a decade and a half of memories: the student house party on a snowy night in DeKalb during my freshman year where I first met him, his inspiring teaching style over four years of studies, long talks with him about history and life during countless dinners at his house, a tour through Bloomsbury in the late 1990s of his old haunts from the 1960s, and many more.

I was fortunate to find in him not only a generous, patient and challenging mentor but also a good friend.

And I know that I was far from alone in that.

Justice delayed but not denied(?)

There is an intriguing report from the Telegraph today regarding the investigation into the killing of Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 in London while she was policing a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy:

Following the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Scotland Yard, which has kept the case open, is planning to send officers to Libya in the hope of bringing the suspected killer and his alleged accomplices to justice. Mr Ameri was identified by a witness in a 140-page secret review of evidence conducted at the request of the Metropolitan Police. The report, seen by The Daily Telegraph, was written by a senior Canadian prosecutor and addressed to Sue Hemming, the head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service. Pc Fletcher was killed by a single bullet that hit her in the abdomen. An 11-day armed siege followed that ended when 30 Libyans from the embassy were deported. No one has ever been charged with killing the officer.

Here, also via the Telegraph, is an original report from ITN on the incident:



There are various kinds of justice to be done with the (apparent) collapse of the Gaddafi regime: the death of PC Fletcher -- and the wounding of several demonstrators -- is only a part of it, but an important one nonetheless.

And I don't feel any different

Another year, another new year.

Though I have to say, all in all, this one was, personally, better than the previous one. Despite a few painful losses.

Indeed, by my standards, I'm feeling positively optimistic.

Still, this is the song that's running through my head right now.




Best wishes to all our friends and family for a happy, prosperous (or at least not impoverishing) and, above all, healthy 2011.

I hope we're all in crash position when we hit

And, while we're considering the Mountain Goats.



The Mountain Goats, 'Matthew 25:21'.

Sudden sadness

Since we were away at a conference last weekend and I was not paying much attention to the internet, I've only made the sad discovery today that one of my colleagues in the History Department, Dr. Mark Pittaway -- a specialist on the political, social and economic history of eastern and central Europe, particularly Hungary -- died last week, aged only 39.

I didn't know Mark as well as I'd have liked, but he was consistently (though humbly) brilliant and always good company. When he drove me back to the train station after another colleague's retirement party last year, we agreed that we really needed to be in touch more often. Sadly, we never really managed it (always, as ever, too much to do....), and I for one am now sorry I'll never have the chance to follow up on that suggestion of his.

Chris has left a fine tribute at Blood & Treasure that captures something essential about what it was like being around Mark:

I remember him laughing as he showed me a pair of peer reviews he'd received for an article: one called it an incisive and nuanced view of labour relations and regime legitimacy in postwar Hungary; the other said that Dr Pittaway was an evil charlatan and an apologist for Stalinist genocide, and thus the article must under no circumstances be published. The editor, safe in the (nearly always) less politicized atmosphere of British historiography, plumped for the former.

Yes, that's how I'll remember Mark: laughing.

As Chris notes, Mark 'made the right enemies for some damn fine reasons, and that's not a bad measure of a man'.

True. And as the tributes here testify, he also made some good friends for some equally fine reasons.

Farewell Tony Judt

No less saddening for being hardly a surprise: historian Tony Judt has died.

He's been praised here before, especially for his excellent book of essays, Reappraisals, which I can't recommend highly enough.

He had a knack for bringing things to a point.

"History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another," he once declared. "It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

"And if you can't find a meaning behind history, what would be the meaning of any single life? I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all."

Being someone sensitive to the influence of chance on history (and the historian), I have to say that this speaks to me.

Volumes.

[UPDATE:] a somewhat older video of Tony Judt, at the Guardian, talking about living with motor neurone disease.

Concentrating the mind. On...Middle Earth.

Quite apart from the issue of the rights and wrongs of capital punishment, I must confess to a strange fascination with how the condemned spend their last moments:

The meal included steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7-Up, all prepared and served at the Utah State Prison, where the execution took place, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. After being moved to an observation cell on Wednesday night, Mr. Gardner spent his time sleeping, reading and watching the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the Utah Department of Corrections said on its Web site.

Now, I'm quite an admirer of both the book and film versions of The Lord of the Rings, but I'm trying to imagine what it would feel like to watch all three films knowing they were the last films I'd ever watch before dying in a hail of bullets.

I'm not sure there's a word for that feeling.

Even in German.

Running amok: make it 'as boring as possible'

I'm not currently in a position to judge how the British television media is handling yesterday's terrible shooting spree in Cumbria, and I'm also a bit agnostic about the argument that such incidents are significantly caused by the media.

But I thought this segment from Screenwipe by Charlie Brooker makes some good points about the way these events are too often presented. (His comments were sparked by coverage of the most recent Amoklauf in Germany -- a little more than a year ago in Winnenden.)



(Via the Guardian.)

One thing I do dislike, though, are the instant diagnoses that inevitably follow.

Like this one:

So a proud, insecure middle-aged man cannot bear to lose face. Unable to ignore a slight, he seethes inwardly with resentment until he explodes.

[...]

One thing is certain: While he was at the peak of the murderous quest, the adrenalin would have been pumping through his body. He would have been on a monstrous high, feeling almost invincible, like Superman, as he discharged the weapon.

Yes, indeed: we can be 'certain' he felt like 'Superman'.

(Taking off on Brooker's point: doesn't this fall into the same kind of category of serving to 'turn this murdering little twat into a sort of nihilistic pin-up boy', albeit this time for the proud, middle-aged and insecure? No doubt many of them wouldn't mind feeling a 'monstrous high' themselves. Sounds almost appealing, now that you mention it....)

Still, Blood and Treasure is on to something in observing that the descriptions being offered by people who knew the shooter -- nice, quiet, normal -- sound a bit familiar:

Obviously, people are partly playing as cast here: he was normal in the sense that no-one was going to think that he was just the kind of chap that would go on a spree killing rampage. The opinions seem to be more a product of people finding something to say to the media rather than a commentary on the individual concerned. But you can get a sort of oblique view of a man smiling maybe twenty times a day, saying the appropriate things at the appropriate times to familiar faces and slowly going mad. Maybe that’s just a product of the standard murderer story too.

For its part, the BBC describes how tough British gun laws are and notes the rarity with which guns are used in crimes there:

Police figures show that there were 39 firearms-related deaths in 2008-09 and that seven of these involved a shotgun. That total was the lowest recorded by the police in 20 years. Guns play a role in just 0.3% of all recorded crimes - one in every 330 incidents.

Though it is, of course, no comfort at all if you or someone you know ends up at the sharp end of that 0.3%.

I just need some place where I can lay my head

Dennis Hopper, RIP.

(Image from Popcorn and Sticky Floors; Title from 'The Weight')