Institutional influences

The orientation of modernity towards control, in relation to social reproduction and to self-identity, has certain characteristic consequences on the level of moral experience. I shall refer to these consequences generically as the sequestration of experience. The phenomenon is directly bound up with the internally referential character of social life and the self. With the maturation of modernity, abstract systems play an increasingly pervasive role in coordinating the various contexts of day-to-day life. External `disturbances' to such reflexively organised systems become minimised.

We can trace out the origin of these developments by reference to several sets of influences, established during the take-off phase of the modern period, but becoming more and more accentuated with the radicalising and globalising of modern institutions. First, and in some ways most important, is the extension of administrative power brought about by accelerating processes of surveillance. ⁵ The expansion of surveillance capabilities is the main medium of the control of social activity by social means. Surveillance gives rise to particular asymmetries of power, and in varying degrees consolidates the rule of some groups or classes over others. But it is a mistake to focus too much on this aspect. Much more fundamental is the intensifying of administrative control more generally, a phenomenon not wholly directed by anyone precisely because it affects everyone's activities. Surveillance always operates in conjunction with institutional reflexivity, even in pre-modern systems. It is the condition of institutional reflexivity and at the same time also in some part its product, and thus expresses in a specific institutional form that recursiveness characteristic of all social reproduction. However, in systems in which surveillance is highly developed, conditions of social reproduction become increasingly self-mobilising.

Particularly in the shape of the coding of information or knowledge

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involved in system reproduction, surveillance mechanisms sever social systems from their external referents at the same time as they permit their extension over wider and wider tracts of time-space. Surveillance plus reflexivity means a `smoothing of the rough edges' such that behaviour which is not integrated into a system -- that is, not knowledgeably built into the mechanisms of system reproduction -- becomes alien and discrete. To the degree to which such externalities become reduced to point zero, the system becomes wholly an internally referential one. This statement does not imply that internally referential systems are consensual or free from conflict; on the contrary, they may be internally contradictory and riven with chronic confrontations. However, such conflicts are organised in terms of system principles, for their various transformative potentials, rather than in relation to extrinsic criteria or demands.

In practice there are many conflicts brought about by tensions between reflexive system reproduction and the inertia of habit or the externalities of tradition. The case of tradition is complicated, nevertheless, because appeals to traditional symbols or practices can themselves be reflexively organised and are then part of the internally referential set of social relations rather than standing opposed to it. The question of whether tradition can be `reinvented' in settings which have become thoroughly post-traditional has to be understood in these terms. This observation applies not only to the human connections involved in social relations, but to material artifacts too. Thus in contemporary debates in architecture about postmodernism and the revival of romanticism, the key issue is whether reactions against `modernism' sustain elements of extrinsic traditional modes, or whether alternatively they have become thoroughly embroiled in an internally referential system. To the degree to which the second of these is the case, attempts at revival of traditional styles are likely rapidly to degenerate into kitsch.

A second important institutional transformation affecting internal referentiality is the reordering of private and public domains. This phenomenon can be understood partly in terms of the creation of spheres of civil society which did not exist in premodern systems. The establishing of civil society connects directly with the emergence of the modern form of the state, thus being referentially tied to it. In traditional states, most of day-to-day

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life, in the rural areas at least, lay outside the scope of the state's administrative power. The local community was for the most part autonomous in terms of its traditions and modes of life, and most forms of personal activity were left more or less completely untouched by the administrative apparatus. However, this external arena was not civil society. Rather, it represented the persistence of modes of life extrinsic to the reflexive order of the political centre.

In the modern social forms, state and civil society develop together as linked processes of transformation. The condition for this process, paradoxically, is the capacity of the state to influence many aspects of day-to-day behaviour. Civil society is structured as the `other side' of the penetration of the state into day-to-day life. Both state and society, to put things bluntly, are internally referential within the reflexive systems established by modernity. What applies to the state/civil society distinction also applies to that of the public/private. The sphere of the private stands opposed to the public in two senses, both strongly influenced, if not wholly brought about, by the changes associated with the development of modernity. The differentiation of state and civil society marks one of these oppositions. The public domain is that of the state, while the private is that which resists the encroachment of the state's surveillance activities. Since the state is the guarantor of law, the private in this sense is partly a matter of legal definition. It is not just what remains unincorporated into the purview of the state, since the state also helps define private rights and prerogatives in a positive fashion.

The private/public opposition in a second sense concerns what is kept concealed from, and what is more openly revealed to, others. Again, it would be wrong to interpret the growth of privacy (and the need for intimacy) in terms of the erosion of a public sphere which used to exist in more traditional communities. Such a suggestion is contained in the early work of Richard Sennett. ⁶ Sennett points out that the words `public' and `private' are both creations of the modern period. `Public' had its origin in an emerging sense of commonly owned property and goods, whereas `private' was first used to refer to the privileges of ruling strata. By the eighteenth century, the terms had come to acquire the senses in which they are used today. `Public' came to be identified with the electorate -- in the sense of `the public' -- and

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with areas of life open to general scrutiny or with the realm of the common good. The sphere of the `private' became the areas of life specifically differentiated from the public realm. ⁷ Sennett argues that the early phase of modernity saw the rise of a public order, centred on the cosmopolitan life of cities, which later declined under the impact of subsequent social changes.

But this thesis is not wholly convincing. What Sennett calls public life belonged as much to more traditional urban settings as to those characteristic of modern social life. Pre-modern cities already enjoyed a flourishing of cosmopolitan culture. In such cities, people already encountered strangers on a regular basis. Yet most urban encounters preserved a collegial character and were dominated by interactions with peers, kin or other familiars. The private has here not yet become a fully concealed or separated domain, as Elias's work makes clear. ⁸ The public only becomes fully distinguished from the private when a society of strangers is established in the full sense, that is, when the notion of `stranger' loses its meaning. From that time onwards, the civil indifference, which is the gearing mechanism of generalised public trust, becomes more or less wholly distinct from the private domain, and particularly from the sphere of intimate relationships.

Privacy, and the psychological needs associated with it, were almost certainly strongly conditioned by a further separation, that of childhood from adulthood. In pre-modern times, certainly in Europe and no doubt in most other non-modern cultures also, the child, from quite early on in its life, lived in a collective setting in interaction with adults in non-familial as well as in domestic locales. The emergence of a separate province of `childhood' demarcated the experience of growing up from outside arenas of activity. Childhood became concealed and domesticated, as well as subject to the core influence of formal schooling. As childhood is separated out from the activities of adults, or at least shaped in distinctive ways, it forms an area of concealment within which private experiences are structured. Schooling is in one sense a public activity, since it is carried on outside the home. But the school remains for the pupils a segregated setting distinct from the adult world of work and other involvements. The gradual concealing of various attributes of development, including major aspects of sexuality, is the outcome of these processes of segregation. ⁹ This is one important factor explaining the close

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connections between the emergence of therapy and a focus on childhood learning in relation to therapeutic aims. Childhood as a separate sphere becomes an `infrastructure' of the personality. This is not to accept the equation of modernity with increasing psychological repression, a view which does not conform to the position established in this book. Rather, therapeutic reconstruction on the basis of childhood experience becomes possible because of the emergence of new `learning fields' brought about by the `invention' of childhood.

In both senses distinguished above -- privacy as the `other side' of the penetration of the state, and privacy as what may not be revealed -- the private is a creation of the public and vice versa; each forms part of newly emergent systems of internal referentiality. These changes form a fundamental part of the general framework of the transformation of intimacy.

Third, a psychological consequence of the two broad processes described is the increasing prominence of shame, in relation to self-identity, as compared to guilt. Guilt essentially depends on mechanisms extrinsic to the internally referential systems of modernity. Guilt carries the connotation of moral transgression: it is anxiety deriving from a failure, or an inability, to satisfy certain forms of moral imperative in the course of a person's conduct. It is a form of anxiety which is most prominent in types of society where social behaviour is governed according to established moral precepts, including those laid down and sanctioned by tradition. Shame is more directly and pervasively related to basic trust than is guilt, because guilt concerns specific forms of behaviour or cognition rather than threatening the integrity of the self as such. Unlike guilt, shame directly corrodes a sense of security in both self and surrounding social milieux. The more self-identity becomes internally referential, the more shame comes to play a fundamental role in the adult personality. The individual no longer lives primarily by extrinsic moral precepts but by means of the reflexive organisation of the self. This is an important point, since it follows that modern civilisation is not founded, as Freud thought, on the renunciation of desire.

In his writings, Freud uses `civilisation' in a very broad sense: he is not talking simply of modernity. <sup>10</sup> Civilisation is any form of social and cultural organisation which goes beyond the mere `primitive'. It is a progressive social order implying increasing

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complexity of social life. The price paid for such complexity, as well as for the `higher cultural achievements' which a civilised life makes possible, is increasing repression and, therefore, guilt. Civilisation must presume bodily deprivation because urges which would otherwise lead to misplaced erotic investment with strangers, or unacceptable aggressiveness towards them, must be held in check. Civilised life, Freud accepts, is generally more secure than that of `primitive beings'. Such security, on the other hand, is exchanged for severe restrictions placed on endemic human tendencies. From this angle, therefore, civilisation is a more moral enterprise than the earlier forms of social order which it increasingly supplants. The aggressiveness repressed by civilisation, conjoined with erotic impulses, are channelled back towards the ego in the form of a harsh moral conscience. This over-weaning super ego produces a pervasive sense of guilt. Civilisation and a strong super ego, `like a garrison in a conquered city', belong together. Guilt, Freud concludes, is `the most important problem in the development of civilisation'; `the price we pay for our advance in civilisation is a loss of happiness through the heightening of this sense of guilt.' ¹¹

If we equate `civilisation' with modernity, and look at its early period of development, a connection with guilt and conscience seems to make some sense. If Max Weber's interpretation of the association between the Puritanism and the rise of capitalism is correct, we can see a mechanism for conscience formation. ¹² The capitalist, after all, according to Weber's portrayal, provides the impetus for the rise of modern institutions by renouncing the gratifications which accumulated wealth can bring. Yet what about the period afterwards, the very time of the maturation of modernity? Followers of Freud have long had difficulty in reconciling their ideas with the seeming moral permissiveness of late modernity. Perhaps civilisation broke apart under weight of its own demands, allowing individuals the chance to give free play to their desires? Perhaps a period of moral restraint, for whatever reason, has been replaced by one of hedonism? These explanations do not sound convincing. Why would a period of the intensifying and globalising of modern institutions produce a relaxation of guilt if heightened guilt is intrinsically associated with greater civilisational complexity? If we discard the theorem that increasing civilisation means increasing guilt, we can see

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things in a different light. The characteristic movement of modernity, on the level of individual experience, is away from guilt. Moral conscience, perhaps of the kind described by Weber, may have been of key importance in the early modern period, because it was on this basis that extrinsic moral imperatives became converted into intrinsic parameters of socialised action. Puritan beliefs became mobilising elements in the disembedding of the new economic systems from extrinsic anchoring restraints. Puritanism thus may have been one of the main instruments in a phase of `take-off' stretching beyond the economic sphere itself -- a `take-off' into a more and more inclusive internally referential ordering of society and nature.

However, rather than promoting a search for new self-identities one could argue that Puritanism provided the `fixity' which allowed the early entrepreneurs to explore new pathways of behaviour without breaking with their pre-established habits and convictions. The `ghost of Puritanism' that prowled around in the subsequent systems of modernity from this regard remained a source of externalities to the new social order: it was not, as Marcuse and many others have argued, its main organising impetus. The more the hold of tradition was broken, and the reflexive project of the self came to the fore, the more dynamics of shame rather than guilt come to occupy the psychological centre-stage. Naturally, even in the phase of high modernity, guilt mechanisms remain important, just as key moral involvements persist -- for, as I shall argue later, the institutional repression produced by the internally referential orders of modernity is much less than complete.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 658