Abstract
This essay dates from a talk on ‘The future of leisure’ that Elias was invited to give in 1957. While not altogether rejecting the then common expectation that the future for human beings would be one of abundant leisure, Elias set the question in the context of long-term developmental processes and the trend in industrial societies towards an increasingly rigid distinction between the spheres of ‘work’ and leisure’. In the early 1960s, Elias greatly enlarged the text, making a sustained argument about the tension between spontaneous feelings and the civilised constraints of self-consciousness, or the ‘feeling-reasoning balance’. In the course of developing his argument, Elias has insightful things to say about jazz, dancing, modern art, the relationship between high culture and mass entertainment, and the changing balance of power between the producers and consumers of art and entertainment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Elias is making a joke: In German, Elias is the name of the prophet who in English is called Elijah.—eds.
- 2.
Elias is alluding to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (London: Macmillan, 1902), a famous collection of stories for children.—eds.
- 3.
That is, China.—eds.
- 4.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), French statesman and diplomat prominent from the Revolution to the Restoration, is said to have remarked that ‘Qui n’a pas connu l’Ancien Régime, n’a pas connu la douceur de vivre’ (Anyone who did not know the Ancien Régime does not know the sweetness of life.)—eds.
- 5.
Elias’s Habilitationsschrift (written 1933) at Frankfurt, now lost, had been a study of one such ‘leisure class’, the courtiers of ancien régime France; but at the time he was writing this essay, the thesis had not been published. Later in the 1960s he would expand the thesis into the book Die höfische Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969), published in English as The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 2]).—eds.
- 6.
In English cricket from the early nineteenth century until 1962, a rigid distinction was maintained between amateur, unpaid cricketers (the ‘Gentlemen’) and professional, paid cricketers (the ‘Players’). One or two matches were played each year between teams representing these two components of the English class system. ‘Gentlemen’ were listed with the title ‘Mr’, while ‘Players’ appeared merely under their unadorned names.—eds.
- 7.
See Elias’s extensive remarks on aristocratic romanticism in Chap. 8 of The Court Society.—eds.
- 8.
See Norbert Elias, ‘The kitsch style and the age of kitsch’, in Early Writings (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 1]), pp. 85–96.—eds.
- 9.
Literally: “noble-kitsch”, i.e. more pretentious forms of kitsch.—eds.
- 10.
Jack McLaren (1884–1954), Australian adventurer and writer. He ran a coconut plantation on Cape York from 1911 to 1919, assisted only by Aborigines.—eds.
- 11.
Jack McLaren, My Crowded Solitude. 7th edn. (London: Duality Press/Quality Press, 1946 [1926]), pp. 40–2.
- 12.
Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus, 6th edn, (Leipzig: Emmanuel Reinicke, 1924 [1899]), p. 2. [Elias was quoting from the 3rd edition of Bücher (1902)—eds.].
- 13.
ibid., pp. 3–4.
- 14.
The original wording of Bücher is different from Elias’s paraphrase. It reads (Bücher, pp. 3–4): ‘Ist unüberwindliche Faulheit der Menschen ältestes Erbteil, wie konnte sie dann überhaupt sich über die Daseinsstufe des früchtesammelnden und wurzelgrabenden Tieres emporheben?’—eds.
- 15.
McLaren, Crowded Solitude, p. 43.
- 16.
ibid., p. 19. This passage was translated by Norbert Elias. However, the quotation from Bücher’s book does not reflect Bücher’s own opinion—as Elias implies—but that of Guglielmo Ferrero (in ‘Les formes primitives du travail’, Revue Scientifique, 4e série, Tome 5, 14 mars 1896, pp. 331–5). Bücher was only critically discussing what Ferrero had outlined before.—eds.
- 17.
Here, Elias is probably for the first time using the phrase ‘quest for excitement’ that later appeared in his and Dunning’s sociology of sports.—eds.
- 18.
McLaren, Crowded Solitude, pp. 56–8.
- 19.
This appears not to be the final version of the sentence, but Elias’s handwritten amendments to it are indecipherable.—eds.
- 20.
Artie Shaw (1910–2004), American clarinettist, composer and bandleader. Elias was quoting from a later edition of Shaw’s book, published by Collier Books in 1963. That edition, however, was not available, so references are given to the 1952 first edition of Shaw’s book.—eds.
- 21.
Artie Shaw, The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), pp. 198–9.
- 22.
Many years later, this thought was developed by the great American world historian William H. McNeill in his book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). McNeill participated in a conference organised by Elias in Bielefeld in 1984, on very long-term human history, though there is no suggestion that he knew of this aspect of Elias’s ideas.—eds.
- 23.
The term ‘Negro’ is not now considered appropriate, but it was not considered offensive at the time Elias was writing. As Stephen Mennell notes in the preface to his book The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Polity, 2007: xii), ‘Writing about American history today often raises questions of nomenclature in light of powerful standards of political correctness, which nevertheless change so quickly that there is a danger of the rapid onset of anachronism. Over the last few decades, there has been a whole sequence of terms considered to be the polite way of referring to the descendants of African slaves: ‘Negroes’, ‘coloured people’, ‘blacks’, ‘African-Americans’, ‘people of colour’. … I have attempted to avoid both offence and anachronism by using an older term whenever a newer term might read incongruously.’ For similar reasons , here we have let Elias’s use of ‘Negro’ stand.—eds.
- 24.
William H.J.B.B. Smith (1897–1973).—eds.
- 25.
Shaw, Trouble with Cinderella, p. 209.
- 26.
Ibid., pp. 226–7.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 312.
- 28.
Tommaso Masaccio (1401–28) and Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), both painters of the early Florentine Renaissance who were important in the development of perspective. In the 1920s Elias had set out to write a Habilitationsschrift under Alfred Weber at Heidelberg on the shared roots of the development of the arts and sciences in Renaissance Florence (see Elias, ‘The emergence of the modern natural sciences ’, Appendix to Early Writings (Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 1]), pp. 111–23); although the thesis was never finished, references to these painters, among other Renaissance artists, crop up frequently in Elias’s later writings.—eds.
- 29.
Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), painter of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’.—eds.
- 30.
Apelles and Protogenes were Greek painters of the fourth century BC, in the time of Alexander the Great. None of their work survives, but their reputation comes down to the present largely through the writings of Pliny the Elder.—eds.
- 31.
Earlier in his career, when writing in German, Elias had often used the term Habitus, which had been common enough in German and French sociology before the Second World War. But the word ‘habitus’ was more or less unknown in English in the period when this essay was written, and so he generally used terms like ‘emotional make-up’ or ‘personality make-up’. Later, after the term had been reintroduced into English largely through translations of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Elias began to use it again. Elias’s definition of habitus was far pithier than Bourdieu’s: he described it as ‘second nature’—that is, all the aspects of feeling and behaviour that individuals have in fact learned since birth, but which are so deeply habituated that they are experienced as simply ‘natural’ or innate.—eds.
- 32.
Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Über das Marionettentheater’, in Berliner Abendblätter, 12–15 December 1810. In English, the text has been published under various titles: ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, ‘On a Theatre of Marionettes’, ‘About Marionettes’, as well as ‘On Puppet Shows’ (translation by David Paisey, Hamburg: Rohse, 1991).—eds.
- 33.
What follows is not a quotation. Elias is evidently paraphrasing Kleist’s story from memory, not entirely accurately. Kleist attributes the technical points about the movements of puppets to a friend who was principal dancer at a local theatre. Moreover, it was neither Kleist nor this friend who had a tame bear; the friend had encountered the (chained) pet bear at the estate of a Baltic nobleman where, after a fencing match with one of the nobleman’s sons, he had been challenged to fight the bear not with a wooden sword but with a rapier. The point about the bear skilfully parrying his thrusts is, however, accurate, and Elias’s inaccurate summary of Kleist’s story does not invalidate the conclusions he is drawing from it. It is likely that in the original talk from which this essay is derived, Elias would have been able to signal verbally more clearly than in the typescript when he was paraphrasing Kleist and when he, Elias, was drawing conclusions from the story. For that reason , we have printed this paragraph as if it were a quotation, even though it is not.—eds.
- 34.
The reference is to the famous Hellenistic -Roman bronze sculpture, known variously as the Boy with Thorn, Fedele or the Spinario, which is now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Since antiquity, many copies have existed, including examples in Paris and Florence . As Kleist tells the story, he (or his hypothetical narrator) had travelled with a 15-year-old friend to Paris and seen the Paris version of the sculpture. Later, after swimming, the friend had placed his foot on a footstool in order to dry it. At this moment both the friend and the narrator were instantly reminded of the sculpture they had seen earlier—eds.
- 35.
At the end of his essay, Kleist questions whether it is necessary to eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back again into the state of innocence. For Kleist, grace seems only to return either by having no consciousness (like the puppet or the bear) or by having infinite consciousness like God.—eds.
- 36.
Here, Elias is referring to Pablo Picassos’ series ‘Las Meninas’ consisting of 58 paintings. These paintings are reinterpretations of Diego Velázquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’ (1656). Picasso finished them in the year 1957. See Elias’s further comments on these paintings in his Introduction to Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8], pp. 49–63); and, on Picasso, ‘Stages of African art, social and visual’, in Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 209–32.—eds.
- 37.
Later, Elias and Dunning once more refer to The Beatles. They cited a poem of David Kerr ‘The Beatles at the Shea Stadium’ (1966) as an example of a ‘mimetic event’; see Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, ‘The quest for excitement in leisure’, in Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 7]), pp. 64–65.—eds.
- 38.
Here Elias uses the German word Staatsräson.—eds.
- 39.
Later, Elias and Dunning will refer to the example of drinking alcohol once more; see Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, ‘Leisure in the spare time spectrum’, in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 7]), p. 104.—eds.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Elias, N. (2018). Spontaneity and Self-consciousness. In: Haut, J., Dolan, P., Reicher, D., Sánchez García, R. (eds) Excitement Processes. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-14911-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-14912-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)