A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

matters of social significance becomes unlikely. The ideology of consumerism closes down
possibilities for such a course even to occur as a thought. Freedom is offered as the practice
of making inconsequential choices that are ultimately insignificant either socially or to the
self.
Individualisation
Norbert Elias has outlined ways in which, over several centuries, the body consciousness
which came to characterise modernity, developing into the general requirements of
respectability and hygiene, focused increasingly on continuous self-monitoring and the
exercise of bodily self-control in every respect. Discussing Elias‟ position, Harvie Ferguson
comments that:
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appropriate dress, appearance, polite modes of eating and drinking, acceptable
means of coughing, sneezing, urination and defecation, the proper restraint in
gesture and forms of interaction, and the provision and protection of personal space
all featured in the new corporeal pedagogy (Ferguson, 2006:106).
A constant and highly differentiated regulation of one‟s own behaviour is identified as
evolving as societies become increasingly larger and more complicated. A social apparatus is
established, Elias suggests, in which:
the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints. These
self-constraints, a function of the perpetual hindsight and foresight instilled in the
individual from childhood in accordance with integration in extensive chains of
action, have partly the forms of self-conscious control and partly that of automatic
habit (Elias, 2000:375).
The individual experiences himself as an individual within modernity because it is in the
continuously emerging interests of modernity, and in the interests of powerful groups
shaping modernity, that he should do so. Through a social moulding process involving
considerable formal education a person acquires the attributes, characteristic and modes of
behaviour that distinguish him from every other individual within his society. It is society
which produces the individual. As Elias puts it:
the individual can only be understood in terms of his communal life with others. The
structure and configuration of an individual‟s behaviour control depend on the
structure of the relations between individuals... The individual is only able to say I if
and because he is at the same time able to say we (Elias, 2001:61).