Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches

The Social Theory of Norbert Elias and the Question of the Nonhuman World

LINDA WILLIAMS The Social Theory of Norbert Elias and the Question of the Nonhuman World The ecological damage that has led to an emerging sixth world extinction event may not be derived entirely from Western modernity. It could, however , be argued that in spite of more general causal factors such as the exponential growth in human populations, the androgenic causes of this environmental crisis have many of their sociogenetic roots in the emergence of modernity in Europe. It was, after all, European modernity that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, and to the heightened instrumentalization of nature that serves the vast engines of a Western capitalist system now global in its reach. Hence, in the contemporary context of global environmental damage and a loss of species diversity unprecedented in human history, it seems appropriate to begin this account of Elias’s concept of the nonhuman world with his consistent focus on what he calls the ‘‘civilizing process’’ in Western modernity. Though Elias’s thinking on our relationship with the nonhuman world is always grounded in the complex contingencies of history, his response to the dominant Western approaches to nature might be best understood with reference to three key theoretical models within his historical sociology. These models devised by Elias pertain to Western modernity, combining dual and dialectically related social processes. The first model is based on Elias’s emphasis on the necessary condition of social interdependence. This is, however, contrasted dialectically with a condition he referred to as homo clausus, which is, in e√ect, a kind of modern false consciousness intent on ignoring the fundamental necessity of social interdependence. The second is Elias’s model of the dual societal processes of involvement and detachment. These dialectically related social forces developed and gained new momentum with the advent of modernity. At times, the dialectical process has produced e√ects of secondary, or reflective involvement. norbert elias and the nonhuman world ∫∑ Though Elias’s concept of secondary involvement has not received much critical attention, it seems to me to o√er a very useful model for ecological critique. Before turning to a discussion of secondary involvement, however, it is important to contextualize Elias’s emphasis on the fundamental processes of interdependence in social relations, and the curious development of a way of thinking that refutes the necessity of social interdependence, in short a denial fundamental to the development of homo clausus. The uncertainty of the ontological borders between the social constructivist models of nature and the material realist recognition of a nonhuman world beyond human discursivity underpins this discussion, though its focus is on where Elias situates the nonhuman world. A third key model, Elias’s notion of social and cultural figurations, is also important to this account of his view of our relations with the nonhuman world. As Elias’s studies of the civilizing process and the advent of modernity have shown so clearly, cultural figurations are a particularly e√ective means of gauging the development of the broad social processes of involvement and detachment. Dance, music, and theater, for example, have very long social histories, and my discussion of Elias concludes with a contemporary example of how these cultural forms are adapted in the popular global medium of YouTube. Certain cultural formations appearing on YouTube are selected as examples of nascent reconfigurations of the nonhuman world imbued with a sense of the potential recognition of the global biosphere as an e√ectively su≈cient condition of human survival. Further to currents in European Romanticism that represented accelerations in the dialectical processes of involvement and detachment, such contemporary figurations indicate a renewed development of secondary, or reflective involvement and subsequent weakening of homo clausus. They suggest a significant shift in the civilizing process of Western modernity likely to gain momentum with advancing social awareness of the ecological crisis. Homo clausus Literally the ‘‘closed personality’’ of modern human subjectivity, homo clausus represents a model of the modern self ‘‘closed o√’’ from, or essentially unaware of its necessary, substantive connectedness to others. This is an individual who is typically even less conscious of the long histories of human interdependency that are constitutive of modern subjectivity. How far Elias’s concept extends to an individual unwittingly ‘‘closed o√’’ from recognition of its historical dependence on the nonhuman world is, however, something I want to discuss here with reference to a number of key works by Elias. Elias first identified homo clausus as an essentially modern self-image in...