Peter Emmerson

 1.1.2 Figuration: a process concept

At this point I want to explain the use of ‘figuration’. Norbert Elias developed this word as one of a number of concepts designed to distance sociological knowledge from its mystical and metaphysical forebears, which tend to produce unrealistic, static models of human experience and can disable the scientific enterprise. Figuration is a notion that attempts to locate sociologists more adequately with life, modelled in terms of social structural processes. The emphasis is on the word process in order to gain better access to the movement characteristic of day to day existence. Non-figurational concepts like ‘class’ and ‘society’ refer to social structures and are inadequate. A structure is expressive of solidity and stability and gives the wrong steer by understating the energy and, as Zygmunt Bauman might say, liquidity of real social experience. My proposal is to bin structural concepts such as class which inherently paralyse social networks and are therefore scientifically unfit for purpose. This could provide us with more adequate tools of analysis, and so reduce the need for intellectual trickery to shoehorn people into sociological models. Figuration offers an opportunity to explore something better suited to facilitate the study of ever changing social networks.

Elias draws our attention to another advantage of using concepts of structural process such as figuration. The structural form of analysis because of its inherent inflexibility, tends to produce rigid contrasts, one important example being the separation of society and the individual. Such a schismatic approach to modelling social life evokes an artificial picture, suggestive of discreet categories of group and personal experience. Such a perspective, argues Elias, is more about the intellectual tradition that dominates western culture than factual accuracy. In a more general form structure is often equated with sociology and individuality with psychology. Where the latter is concerned people are viewed as separate, isolated beings governed by instinctive, internal forces that motivate survival thoughts and practices. This so-called agency perspective, which in its most idealistic and extreme form argues that people have free-will, conjures the impression that the forces regulating togetherness are of secondary importance. Such psychologism is untenable as Popper has pointed out, because it relies on an infinite reduction to the origin, a programme of research to identify the very first cause – was it the chicken or the egg? – impossible. Elias is with Popper, and for that matter Marx on this, that the place to start is the social. Figuration is a concept designed by Elias for social scientific analysis that assesses the flow of interdependencies that occur between people in social networks. Elias has demonstrated how this approach dissolves thorny problems such as the division between ‘society and the individual’ (structure and agency): the intellectual tradition that is responsible for this unscientific model can be left to parent those areas it was designed to fit – religion and philosophy.

Figuration is therefore a concept developed to go beyond the limitations of the latter, to provide greater access to the facts because figuration has a greater degree of what Elias calls ‘reality congruence’, ie. it is more scientific. It can take account of both structural and personal experiences because it guarantees that we look for processes that bind people together with varying levels of dependency. These relationships of interdependency involve power, which again is a process in which the balances change. Whilst I suspect we need to abandon the use of the concept power for the same reasons already alluded to with respect to class and society, Elias points us in a direction which may be fruitful. By improving the degree of consonance between the conceptual tools used by sociologists (and social scientists generally for that matter) and their research material, I believe we can increase our potential to explain social matters.

Let’s consider briefly the example of Marx’s great breakthrough which analysed the relationship between class and social conflict. My argument is that the pioneering work Marx carried out has not been fully exploited partly because it has been bogged down in fruitless theometaphysical (see 1.2 below) debate about the definitive nature of the two classes of capitalism (the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’). Whilst this too is probably associated with ingrained academic habits that can be traced back via Hegel to the ancient Greeks, I think it is also connected to Marx’ uncritical use of the concept class. Class is a notion far too profoundly steeped in supernatural and philosophical ethers, geared to finding the absolute truth and stability: social experience is thus perceived as if it were some reified, solid thing. What is ironic about Marx is that having criticised Adam Smith and others for not recognising the ideological content of their ideas, he then proceeded to fall into the same trap himself by failing to spot the damaging effect that an idealistic concept like class had on his own model. Figuration is a more realistic concept that I feel can help us avoid the traps that caught out the likes of Marx, by offering the prospect of a more scientific analysis with greater access to the fluidity of social experience, and at the same time, moving us beyond such ossifying debates as class.

  1.1.1 Some general points about Elias’ work

 Elias developed the ‘civilizing process’, as a model to be tested, which if nothing else, offers a more realistic understanding of the growth in rationality so much at the heart of Weber’s work. For the latter rationality was a version of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, an ideal that existed in the mind to be transposed onto different social experiences. Thus, when explaining the character of western capitalism, Weber linked general characteristics such as the search for profit, which is not peculiar to the West, with specifically western variables such as free labour and Protestant beliefs. In this way historically located activities are described in terms of general or ideal concepts which in turn define the perspectives of social science.

For Elias the process of the development of this style of thinking can be traced back even further, associated with the emergence of a new word, ‘courtesy’, which he correlates with social changes experienced by medieval knights, who were schooled in violence and had few predators. In a very short time many knights became what we would call redundant and plied their trade as troubadours at the courts of the great lords and ladies. They found themselves in a state of dependency having to control their emotions and become more servile in order to stay in contact with the great Lords who held the purse strings and who held court.

By the sixteenth century Elias detects the rise in use of another word ‘civility’, synonymous with the formation of the court aristocracy. Civility is indicative of a deepening level of self-control which because it is inculcated in childhood, becomes part of the aristocratic character or, as Elias prefers, ‘habitus’. Habitus is a process word Elias uses instead of personality in order to portray human identity in more developmental terms, formed predominantly by experience, but, interdependent with biological predisposition. He believed that human beings are different to all other life-forms with respect to the level of control they can exert over biological instincts. For the figurations close to Louis XIV self-restraint is no longer something to be imposed by the physical presence of others, it is a normal feature of aristocratic make-up. Elias writes of the small day to day activities of the exercise of power as the King’s figuration manipulates the fortunes of the high aristocracy and the emergent high bourgeoisie who had little choice but to be compliant, if they wanted to remain attached to the royal figuration and the benefits it could provide.

The civilizing process is correlated with the changes in the balance of power, that occurred in relation to the formation of nation states and the levying of taxes needed to fund grand schemes such as monopolizing access to the means of violence and the training associated with their use. Aristocrats were not war lords, they were skilled social operators who worked behind a front, as Goffman would say, in the competition for royal patronage. Naked violence was shunned in such social networks as processes formed that relied on social manipulation rather than open resistance.

Elias describes how such figurations with their civilized habitus have slowly extended beyond the elites, pacifying wider social networks as the level of interdependency has increased. Civilized people experience themselves internally as two people, much in the Freudian sense, one governed by short-term desires, the other who assiduously manages such urges to avoid damaging censure or disaster by carefully studying longer-term possibilities: you may lose the battle by retreating but win the war. This is not a top-down determinist pattern of social change, it is about people making life choices to accommodate power and survive.

People viewed in the manner suggested by Elias, never cease to be involved in change. Life’s experiences are modelled as processes that have no beginning nor a definitive end: the civilising process does not prescribe some state of ideal being in the form of a civilized person, it just tracks changes in the habitus of certain figurations over a long period of social development, sometimes quick, more often slow, and certainly not inevitable. The civilizing process is a model that was derived from a scientific study of history that has learned from the mistakes of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons; that it is necessary to be more ‘reality congruent’. The proliferation of the scientific habitus since the 17^th century is a feature of the civilising process.

Elias is at pains to emphasise that there was no planning involved in the development of self-control: the civilizing process is not connected to some ethereal dialectical spirit or zeitgeist moving in mysterious ways functioning in relation to some pre-installed design system or set of laws – his science is a programme of exploration using a theory to be tested by historical evidence. However, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber or Parsons would no doubt have made this claim. The difference is that the scientific sociology of Norbert Elias has stripped away any pretence towards offering up absolute truths. Elias’ science is sensitive to its limitations, has no claim to objectivity, does not attempt to suggest that it can define the causes of anything as yet. All that process sociology can establish at present is that sociological variables are interdependent with one another in a web of possibilities. The best we can do, he would say, is attain sufficient ‘relative detachment’ to make statements about the manner in which the processes involving social structures and functions interrelate with one another. By using models such as the civilizing process social scientists can use the past to build insights into the present so that modest claims about contingencies can be drawn, rather than bold causal statements. Consequently, the future is difficult to tell.

The science that Elias espouses is aware of the sheer size of the task because of the immense complexity of social processes which need a new, more reality congruent, dynamic language to analyse them more usefully. There is no singular in this exercise, there are just figurations of people who can use their self-control to become relatively detached enough to do science, people who can turn down the volume of their emotions and values sufficiently enough to do physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Even though the problems are different in the latter, linked to the greater difficulty in attaining the necessary level of relative detachment to study them scientifically, I believe it is worth taking on the habitus of what Elias calls Homines aperti (open people) that should allow more valid conclusions to be drawn in relation to understanding human problems.

This is not to suggest that in using Elias’ approach the problem of how to produce more valid and reliable sociological evidence will be solved, but it does hold out a sociological way of moving on from the impasse that emerged during the 1970s as Parsonianism and Marxism hit the buffers. Elias’ model can give us a scientific diagnosis of the problem and a means of moving beyond it. The key theme of this essay is geared to one possible reason: that too many sociologists have nowadays become more susceptible to idealism and turned down the influence of the scientific ethos on their work, not taking sufficient account of what Elias called ‘the detour via detachment’. I want to help change the emphasis here. There is long tradition in western cultures that life is about the pursuance of perfection. Thus, much of our thinking is habitually utopian. These habits die hard. I want to argue, that the problem with sociology, and probably science generally, is that it too insensitive to the damage done by idealism.

1.1 Grounding

 I want to begin this essay by referring to the influence of sociologist Norbert Elias. As far as I can see his work on the nature of human knowledge is at the limit of what we can rely on: thus, I start from there. His books, The Civilizing Process vols I & II, The Court Society, Involvement and Detachment, The Symbol Theory and What is Sociology? provide most of the material from which I have developed these ideas. I want to argue that they offer a basis on which sociologists, and for that matter scientists generally, could extend their understanding and improve their ability to help sort out social or natural problems. Elias built on the findings of his predecessors, something no doubt true of many writers. However, Elias did not just reform their ideas, whether philosophers, historians, natural scientists or social scientists, he radically reworked them to produce an alternative more viable analysis of what science is and what a social science could and should look like. In this respect his work is like no-one else’s since it has survived and prospered where his main rivals in Marxism (with its emphasis on class conflict) and Parsonianism (which gives precedence to the importance of value consensus), were found profoundly wanting. Unfortunately the continuing interest in Elias’ work has been accompanied by a cataclysmic crisis in sociological confidence where scientific modes of analysis are concerned, that may explain the continued under-exposure of the model, since the dethroning of Parsons and Marx.

It is my view that there has been a de-sciencizing process going on in sociology that needs to be resisted, especially as close scientific relatives, biology and psychology, have been visibly prospering underpinned by the Darwinian model. It is my belief that the flood gates were opened for the anti-science figurations of sociologists correlated with the theoretical vacuum that opened up as the two giants collapsed during the late 1960s and early 70s, allowing sociology to be re-colonized by a band of truth-finders whose interests were about linking sociology to the humanities, by strengthening the bond with its parent, philosophy. From what I can see this was a serious mistake as sociologists are seen as offering just another learned opinion rather than providing scientifically backed models for testing.

This begs the question – what would a new scientific sociology look like? This is where Elias comes in. I’m not suggesting that, as yet, his model offers a social scientific equivalent to Einstein, Heisenberg, Dalton or Darwin: a giant of the contemporary sociological universe, Tony Giddens, has commented on the small likelihood such an outcome. However, he may be wrong. At least Elias’ model takes a sociological approach rather than falling back on the parent philosophy for answers to its problems: Elias offers a scientific way out.

My essay is a modest contribution to this process by focussing on the problem of idealism. There are three interrelated aspects of interest here. Firstly, idealism makes scientists susceptible to utopian flights of fancy such as the pursuit of the absolute truth/error. Secondly, that the practices of science become distorted by the pursuance of idealistic notions such as equality and justice. Thirdly, that an excess of such ideals creates an environment where scientists are very susceptible to over-stating the value of their findings. My argument is that we can use Elias as an anchoring point to keep sociological voyages of discovery tied to realistic destinations and practices, where all is relatively uncertain.

De-idealisation and the development of Relative Uncertainty: an aspect of the Sciencization Process

Preamble

This essay does not claim the status of a conventional learned academic article. It is a beginning, an exploration of some of my ideas, posted here because I work outside of the normal academic nexus. Whilst this has advantages, giving me the relative autonomy to pursue my interests, it does leave me vulnerable where critical discussion is concerned. I therefore offer up my essay in all humility, for I am very much aware of my fallibility, my relative uncertainty. Where you believe me to be mistaken tell me so. My hope is that the essay has fertility, and can be the ground on which further, more significant produce can be grown.

The analysis examines certain aspects of the changing use of ideals, especially the truth. As far as I can see ideals are an expression of our ability to think about perfection, the search for which has had enormous influence over human affairs. One very important example concerns our thinking about what is right and wrong, otherwise known as morals or ethics. For example, the Ten Commandments can be seen as a set of statements from the Old Testament that tell us about what God knows to be true. They are ideals that provide us with a point of reference on how to think and behave, whether you believe in them or not. It is likely, even if you don’t believe, that you will have a similar set of beliefs that you hold as truths.

This ancient pattern of belief in ideals still holds enormous significance for us today. However, I want to argue that there has been a gradual decline in the influence of ideals. This decline is plotted in this essay in relation to three interrelated processes: the rise to prominence of more and more people interested in pursuing a business-oriented approach to the problem of survival; the gradual spread of beliefs in the benefits of democratic systems of government; the dramatic growth in scientific practice and knowledge over the last 300 years or so.

For the method used to carry out this analysis I am much indebted to one of the greatest sociologists, Norbert Elias. Elias’ approach takes the social group as its basic unit of analysis. Groups, or what he terms figurations, are regulated by processes that involve complex sets of interdependencies that bind their membership together. Life is about change and the means by which we study it should be consonant with that fact. The essay is an attempt to apply this model to the problem of ideals such as truth.