In Norbert Elias’ ‘The Civilizing Process’ he describes the courtization of the medieval warrior class; the emergence of the age of absolutism, the displacement of the knights—and the closer relationship to power which the bourgeoisie gradually obtained.
One passage describes the increasingly intimate relationship between courtly nobility and bourgeoisie. This growing class proximity should remind us of a more contemporary phenomena today: the wokifiction of liberalism. Read this passage first and then I’ll elaborate.
At first reading of this passage I was reminded of Angela’s Nagles book Kill All Normies. In one section she describes the maintenance of social currencies which online leftism functions to create and maintain. When a woke diatribe is created—usually by creating a new moral-linguistic taboo (you can’t say X word anymore, it’s racist, sexist ect…you must say Y instead)—the social value of this new linguistic code is deflated the more its use circulates. Every so often a ‘purge’ must be initiated. Somebody who has unwittingly misused the new hygienic language code is expelled (cancelled) and the social currency is re-valued.
Not overlooking the show-trial nature to this vortex of moral hysterics, we can see a similar structure to what Elias describes in the era when the bourgeois and courtly nobility began to merge. The anxiety and need for distinction creates a psycho-social pressure points in which certain habits, rituals, manners and so on, are used to create distinctive breathing space. I don’t point this out to undermine the demand for hierarchical distinction(I generally think this is being stifled today) but rather it’s value lies in pointing out how, at times when no real distinction exists or is possible to follow, ‘social ‘currencies’—as opposed to real ethics—form.
As Elias points out, the knightly warrior class may have looked down on those of other lower classes but they never felt this ‘mannerly’ anxiety and never developed the same sense of repulsion towards them. They may not have seen them as equal, or deserving respect, but they were quite relaxed around them and never felt the ‘need’ to ‘distinguish’ themselves. One can assume that their capacity as warriors —not to mention their lifestyles, skills, activities and social rituals—were simply so evidently distinct (perhaps also superior) that they felt no need for a social currency. The conclusion we can draw is that social currencies are forms of plastic distinctiveness which emerge when there ‘should be’ distinction, but in social reality there is not.
Notice the early form of mimesis which resembles our own time. A courtly, mannerly class cultivate a set of behaviours and performative codes that ‘distinguish themselves’—the bourgeoisie mimic them so as to cultivate their own prestige, and the courtly elite then feel disgusted, exaggerate the manners—and the bourgeois simply copy them….again! The cycle continues; it intensifies. Mimicry and disgust feed off each-other inside a psychogenic whirlwind! Again, why didn’t this ever happen when a warrior class was on top of the social pyramid? Because it’s a hell of a lot harder to dedicate our lives to life-risking combat than it is to wear certain clothes, speak with a certain intonation, socialize in certain circles and eat our dinner a certain way. The courtly nobility created their own historical death bed when they made the character which defines them so damn easy to copy.
Elias’ argument concerning conditions of class cramping, stems more from his view on the interdependency created through urbanization and economization. However true that might be, there is also a clear element of social indistinction which modernity has brought about. This causes the need to create (merely therapeutic) forms of distinction. The courtly aristocracy’s comical anxiety-driven mimesis relationship with the bourgeoisie ultimately came to an end with the French revolution when the courtly class was fully replaced. We can observe that from this point on, a stronger emphasis was placed on other aspects of human existence as markers of prestige, other than courtly mannerisms: merit, hard work, personal moral character being the more positive aspects of early bourgeois values. While wealth, professional credentials and consumption capacity could be seen as the more negative ones. Nonetheless, the courtly elite was pushed aside. That was until the 2008 crash—which in many ways marks the end to the linear progress of liberal societies—and suddenly, we could argue, courtly forms of distinction began to emerge again, especially among the post war peoples who—with their ‘end of history’ character— are truly bereft of real distinction.
Add to that sad spiritual reality, the negative aspects of arrogant bourgeois values such as wealth and credential collecting begin to become scarce or devalued achievements for the younger generations of post historical life. Late capitalism shifts value from wealth creation to consumer prestige. Social currencies violently intrude again through a market of post-industrial consumption(modern marketing). Definitively speaking, social currencies are the distinctions of the indistinct.
The aggressive intrusion of manners as distinctions for the indistinct, as I have put it, should not be seen as ’superficial’ in the simple sense. This superficiality does not mean a distant and cynical performance. According to Elias the behavioural and cultural changes which occurred in the age of absolutism are deeply entrenched super-ego forces—and so are mostly imperceptible and unconscious; they are fixed in the very character of those who trade in social currencies. ‘What you own ends up owning you’, as the film Fight Club put it, expresses this internalizing power of social currency. Through a sense of distinction, status and value, a person who trades in this or that social currency, despite the superficiality of the actions, does not necessarily experience the stupid rituals as false or cynically deployed. Rather, he experiences them as absolutely necessary and almost inseparable from his very identity.
As we become a culture trapped in the anxiety of indistinction, a whole host of indistinct distinctions emerge. Much of the internet is made up of these procedures. If you drink soy milk, if you use gendered binary language, if you are keeping up to date with the hidden gestures and rituals that denote a woke person— or a based person. It’s an endless game of social performance and deflation/inflation events that keep the created signifiers of distinction alive long enough to provide therapeutic relief for those suffering from acute distinction anxieties. The 21st century’s embrace of the internet as a media culture has accelerated these swings and roundabouts of cultural antagonism as a media culture is perfectly fitting for a courtly society that sees itself as valued and categorized based on performative social displays of ‘not being like’ so and so.
However, we shouldn’t scoff at this distinction anxiety. It is often a healthy and necessary motivator for identify creation and social organization. The issue again lies in the choice between a real form of distinction and a social currency crafted to merely cope with conditions of sameness.
Philosophers, warriors and monks all share a common spiritual legacy in this regard. They all seek something outside the cheaply earned and constantly adjusting value systems of social currency traders and creators. They all seek forms of distinction whereby the trajectory for gaining it is almost totally uncommodifiable, comes at a high demand of sacrifice—and is rarely ‘copied’ in the simple sense; it is certainly not reproducible as so many other aspects of human relations are through marketing. In this context, mimicry is too demanding and risky to be favourable to those who are simply looking for mimetic relationships to power and beauty.
According to Elias, this mimicry and identification often comes with crippling conditions of perpetual shame for class aspirants.
Again, do we not see this courtization phenomena—and its anxious incongruity and falseness—in various forms of politicized marketing? I again couldn’t help but think of the progressive managerial norms whereby not only class status is childishly mimicked but also a certain historical character is copied. Recall the DSA meeting in 2019 (an American Democratic Socialist party) that went viral after one of their meetings live-streamed. The meeting contained all sorts of peculiar rituals and aggressively enforced behavioural codes that could only be described as incongruity, distress and falseness: what we would later call ‘cringe’. Despite the hysterics of conservatives, these ‘radicals’ were just another bump in the road of post-industrial courtly life. Political marketing takes historical actions and figures and makes it mimicable in a false and jarring sense; a sense in which high anxieties are infused with evidently false behaviours. All altruistic corporate capitalism reflects the same phenomena; its board rooms, ‘activists’ diversity quotas, ecological concerns and so on. It all stinks of the same incongruous, status-anxious and largely mindless pursuit of social access that Elias describes within the merging of the bourgeoisie and courtly nobility.
The era of absolutism provides such a crucial contextual parallel with our time, as it reveals a situation whereby, for sociological reasons, a view of ourselves ‘as we are’ —stripped from the mere realm of trinkets, objects, performative mannerisms, naked in front of an all knowing God in the Platonic and Christian sense—is shifted towards a purely conventional self consciousness whereby what is good can be moved about and managed based on a mere desire for distinction alone, lacking the reality of that distinction. The radical (real) self consciousness is replaced by a courtly one crafted through social currency.