On Transformations of AggressivenessAuthor(s): Norbert EliasSource: Theory and Society, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Mar., 1978), pp. 229-242Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656698Accessed: 01/10/2009 21:27

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ON TRANSFORMATIONS OF AGGRESSIVENESS*

NORBERT ELIAS

The affective structure of man is a whole. Though particular instinctual manifestations may be indicated by different names according to their various directions and functions - we may speak of hunger and the urge to spit, of the sexual instinct and aggressive impulses - in life these are no more separable than the heart from the stomach or the blood in the brain from blood in the genitals. They complement and partly supersede one another, transform themselves within certain limits and neutralize one another; a disturbance here makes itself felt there. Thus they form a sort of circuit in a person, a partial totality within the totality of the organism, whose structure is still opaque in many ways, but whose form, whose social stamp is in any case of decisive significance for the dynamic of a particular society as much as for any individual within it.

The way drives or emotional manifestations are talked about today some- times seems to suggest that we harbor a whole bundle of different instincts inside ourselves. People speak of a "death instinct" or a "need for esteem" the way they do of various chemical substances. Detailed observations regarding these different instinctual manifestations may be extremely fruitful and revealing. But the forms of thought in which these observations are conceptualized cannot but remain inadequate to the living object if they fail to express the unity of the instinctual economy (Triebhaushalt) and the way

* Translator's note: The present text is based on "Uber Wandlungen der Angriffslust" from Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Unter- suchungen (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), vol. I, pp. 263-283. The translation was first prepared by Johan Goudsblom and Rod Aya, Goudsblom being mainly responsible for fidelity to the German meanings, Aya for the formulation and editorial arrangement of the English text. This draft was then reviewed and thoroughly revised by the author, who introduced numerous changes (many of which depart from the German original) to make the fimished version conform to his present views. Hence this essay is not a tight-fitting translation, but the author's reconstruction of his meaning in another language. ? 1978 by Norbert Elias.

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in which drives of every kind and direction inhere in this structure. Aggres- siveness, with which the following observations are concerned, is accordingly not a separable species of instinct. It is possible to speak of a drive to aggression only if one is aware that it refers to a certain instinctual function in the whole of an organism, and that changes of this function indicate changes in the total patterning of the personality structure itself.

The level of belligerence (Kampflust), its tone and intensity, is not entirely uniform today, even among the nations of the West. But these differences, which often seem considerable when viewed from close quarters, vanish from view and appear quite trivial if the belligerence of "civilized" people is con- trasted with that of societies at another stage of affect control. Measured against the battle fury of the Abyssinian warriors - powerless as they were against the technical apparatus of a "civilized" army - or that of tribes at the time of the Great Migrations, the belligerence of even the most martial nations in the "civilized" world appears subdued. There the lust for battle, like all other human drives, is directly bound even in war by the advanced state of the division of functions, by the correspondingly stronger intertwining of in- dividuals, by their stronger dependencies on the technical apparatus and on one another. It is restricted and restrained by an immense number of rules and prohibitions partly transformed into self-constraints. It is thus to some extent "refined," "sublimated," and "civilized" like other forms of lust, and only in dreams or occasional eruptions which we diagnose as symptoms of illness does something of its immediate and unregulated force come into the open.

The same transformation can be observed in the sphere of hostile collisions between individuals as in all other battlefields of the emotions. Whatever stage within this process of transformation may be represented by the Middle Ages, again, it may be enough to take as a point of departure the standards of the secular upper classes, the warriors, in order to illuminate the overall pattern of this development. The discharge of emotions in battle was perhaps not quite so violent in the Middle Ages as in the earlier period of the Great Migrations. Compared with the standards of the modern age, it was overt and unrestrained enough. Nowadays cruelty, delight in the killing and torture of others, like the social use of brute force, is placed increasingly under strong social control vested in the organization of the State. All these forms of pleasure, restricted by punitive threats, are gradually "refined" and express themselves only indirectly. And it is only in times of social unheaval and war or, for that matter, in colonial territories where social control is looser, that they break through in a more direct and overt form, less subdued by feelings of shame and revulsion.

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In the Middle Ages social pressure went in the opposite direction. Robbing, fighting, hunting men and animals - all this formed part and parcel of

everyday life, corresponding to the structure of society. Especially for the strong and powerful, it belonged to the joys of living.

"I tell you," goes a battle hymn attributed to the troubadour Bertran de Born, "that I find no such savor in eating, drinking, or sleeping as in hearing men shout 'Get them!' from both sides, hearing the neighing of horses that have lost their riders, hearing the cries 'Help! Help!', and in seeing men great and small go down on the grass beyond the fosses, and the dead with their sides ripped open by the pennoned stumps of lances.'"1 One only enjoyed life - eating, drinking, sleeping - with the tumult of war in view: the dead with their sides ripped open and the fatal lances, the neighing of horses that have lost their riders, the shout "Get them!", and the cries for help of the vanquished - all this still gives us even in the form of a song an impression of the primeval ferocity of feeling. And as Bertran de Born says in another passage:

Here comes the happy season when our ships will land and King Richard will come, gallant and courageous like never before. Now we will see gold and silver spent; the newly built catapults will do their utmost; the walls will collapse, the towers fall and crumble; enemies will get a taste of prison in chains. I love the melee of shields colored blue and vermillion, the ensigns and banners of various colors, the tents and rich pavillions set up in the open air, the breaking lances, the pierced shields, the glimmering helmets cleaved, the blows one gives and receives.

War, according to the explication of one of the chansons de geste, means being stronger to get at the enemy, to cut down his vines, tear up his trees, ruin his land, storm his castle, fill in his well, capture and kill his people. Mutilating prisoners is a particular pleasure: "By my soul," says the king in the same chanson, "I don't care what you say, I don't give a damn for your threats. Every knight I've taken I've taunted and cut off his nose or his ears. If it was a sergeant or a merchant, he lost a foot or an arm."2

Such things were not only said in song. These epics were an integral part of social life. And they express, far more directly than most of our literature, the feelings of the audience for whom they were intended. They may exaggerate in detail. Even in the time of chivalry, money sometimes already had its affect-subduing and -transforming influence. Ordinarily one mutilated only the poor and the humble, for whom no considerable ransom was to be expected, and spared the knights for whom one hoped to receive it. And the

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chronicles, the most immediate records of social life, are full of like examples. They were written mostly by clerics, and the value-bias they contain is therefore often that of socially weaker people menaced by the warrior caste. But the picture they transmit is nonetheless quite authentic. "He spends his life," we read of a knight,

in pillage, destruction of churches, attacks on pilgrims, and the oppression of widows and orphans. He takes special pleasure in mutilating innocents. In a single monastery, that of the black monks of Sarlat, there are 150 men and women to be found whose hands he's hacked off or whose eyes he's gouged out. His wife is just as cruel. She helps him carry out his executions. She takes special pleasure in torturing the unfortunate women. She has had their breasts chopped off or their fingernails pulled out so as to make them unfit for work.3

Acting out affects such as these might still occur in later phases of social development, but they would appear abnormal, as "pathological" cases. In that epoch, however, no one had the social power to punish such inclinations. The only threat, the only danger that could arouse fear, was that of being overwhelmed in battle by someone more powerful. Save for a small elite, as Luchaire, the historian of French society in the thirteenth century, makes

clear, robbery, pillage, and murder formed an integral part of the behavior standard of warrior society of that age, and there is no reason to believe that things were different in other countries. Eruptions of cruelty were not excluded from social intercourse. They were not socially stigmatized. Joy in the torture and killing of others was great, and it was a socially permitted delight. To a certain extent, the very structure of society pressed in this direction, making it necessary, and even seem appropriate, to behave in this manner.

What, for example, was to be done with prisoners? Money was of limited use in this society. As for prisoners of rank who could pay, one restrained oneself to a certain degree. But the others? To keep them meant to feed them. To return them meant to enhance the wealth and fighting power of the enemy. For the working, serving, fighting hands of inferiors were part of the wealth of the landowning warrior classes of that age. So prisoners were killed or sent back so mutilated as to be unfit for work or military service. The same went for the destruction of fields, filling in wells, and chopping down trees. In a predominantly agrarian society, in which immovable property formed the main part of possession, all this served to weaken the opponent. The stronger affectivity of behavior was to a certain extent socially necessary. One behaved in a socially expedient way and thereby found pleasure. And yet it was

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wholly in keeping with the less stringent social regulation of instinctual life, that this pleasure in annihilation sometimes turned into the most extreme charity owing to a sudden identification with the victims, and surely also to feelings of guilt and anxiety produced by the constant threat of danger. Today's victor could tomorrow be vanquished, imprisoned, and placed in extreme jeopardy. In the middle of this constant to and fro, this alternation between manhunts - namely, times of war - and animal hunts or tour- naments - the amusements of peacetime - little could be reckoned in advance: the future was almost always uncertain, even for those who had escaped the secular world; God and the loyalty of a few people firmly bound to each other were the only certainty. Fear was ubiquitous; life was here and now. And so, in keeping with quick changes of fortune, pleasure could suddenly change into fear, and extreme fear just as suddenly into a rage of pleasure.

The majority of the secular upper classes in the Middle Ages led the life of warlords at the head of a wild soldiery, with the corresponding tastes and habits. The reports this society left behind yield, by and large, a picture similar to reports of feudal societies in our time, and they show a kindred standard of behavior. Only small numbers of courtly elites, of whom more shall be said later, stood out by their somewhat different standards.

The warrior of the Middle Ages not only loved battle, he lived in it. His youth was committed to preparation for battles. When he grew up, he was knighted and waged war as long as his powers permitted him, well into old age. His life had no other function. His home was at once a watchtower, a fortress, a base for attack and defense. If, by exception, he chanced to live in peace, he still required at least the illusion of war: He fought in tournaments, which were often little different from real battles. "For society then, war was the normal state," says Luchaire of the thirteenth century,4 and Huizinga of the four- teenth and fifteenth: "The chronic form wars were apt to take, the con- tinuous disruption of town and countryside by all sorts of dangerous rabble, the perpetual threat of a harsh and unreliable justice ... nourished a feeling of generalized insecurity."S

In the fifteenth century, as earlier in the ninth or thirteenth, a knight still expresses his joy in war, though it is a bit more restrained and less unequivo- cal than before. The speaker is Jean de Bueil. In 1465, having fallen into dis- favor with the king, he dictates his life history to a servant. No longer is it a free and independent knight who speaks, a little king in his own territory, but someone who is himself in service:

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It is a joyous thing, is war. .. You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears rise to your eye. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and ac- complish the command of our Creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death? Not at all; for he feels so strengthened, he is so elated, that he does not know where he is. Truly he is afraid of nothing.6

It is pleasure in war, certainly, but no longer the immediate delight in manhunting, the clanging of swords, the neighing of steeds, the enemies's fear - how nice it is to hear their cries for help -or their death - how fine to see the dead lying with their bodies ripped open. Rather, it is the solidarity with friends, the enthusiasm for fighting a good cause; and, more powerfully than before, battle lust serves as intoxication to overcome fear. These are quite simple and forceful feelings speaking here. One kills, gives oneself over completely to the struggle, sees one's friend fight, and fights at his side. One forgets where he is, forgets death itself. It is beautiful. What more?

There is abundant evidence that attitudes toward life and death among the secular upper classes of the Middle Ages by no means always accorded with those which prevail in books by the clerical classes and which are quite often considered typical for the period. For the clerical classes, at least for their spokesmen, the form of life was determined by thoughts of death and the hereafter. Among the worldly upper classes, this was by no means always the case. However frequently moods and phases of this kind may have occurred in the life of every knight, again and again we find evidence of a quite different attitude. One can quite frequently encounter an advice that does not agree with today's standard image of the Middle Ages: Let thy life not be determined by the thought of death. Love the joys of this life.

"No courteous man should reprove joy; he should love it always."7 This is a rule of courtesy from a tale of the early thirteenth century. Or, from a somewhat later time: "A young man ought to be merry and lead a joyous life. It does not befit a young man that he be morose and pensive."8 These were the obvious sneers of the knight - who surely did not have to be "pensive" -

against the cleric, who no doubt was more often "morose" and "pensive."

This by no means life-denying attitude toward death finds especially earnest and explicit expression in some verses from the "Rules of Cato," which

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passed from generation to generation throughout the Middle Ages. The insecurity of life is one of the basic themes that recur time and again in these verses:9

Sint uns allen ist gegeben ein harte ungewissez leben

Since we have all been given a hard, uncertain life

it reads, for example. But what follows is not the conclusion, Think thus of death and of the hereafter; rather,

If you wish to live in fear of death, so shall you live a life of misery.

Wildu viirhten den tot so muostu leben mit not.

Or, in another passage, especially clear and beautiful: 10

Man weiz wol daz der tot geschiht, man weiz ab siner zuokunft niht: er kumt geslichen als ein diep und scheidet leide unde liep. Doch habe du guote zuoversiht vurhte den tot ze sere niht vurhtestu in ze sere du gewinnest vreude nie mere.

One knows well that death occurs, but one knows not when: death steals in furtively like a thief, and parts body and soul. But be in good hope; do not fear death so very much. If you do, Never more will you find joy.

Nothing of the beyond. Whoever lets his life be determined by thoughts of death has no more joy in life. Certainly, the knights felt themselves to be strongly Christian, and their lives were imbued with the ideas and rituals of that tradition of faith; but, in keeping with their different social and psycho- logical situation, Christianity was also associated in their minds with a very different scale of values from that of the clerics who wrote and read books. For warriors it had a considerably different tone and tenor. It did not keep them from tasting the joys of the world; nor did it stop them from killing and plunder. That belonged to their social function, to their qualities of rank, of which they were proud. Not to fear death was a vital necessity for a knight. He had to fight. For the individual, the structure of this society and its tensions made it imperative: he had little choice.

But this constant preparedness for combat, weapon in hand, was a vital necessity not only for the warriors, the knightly classes. The life of towns- people was also interlaced with large and petty feuds to a far greater extent than it was in later times; and here too aggressiveness, hatred, and delight in torturing others were less restrained than in subsequent phases.

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With the gradual rise of a third estate, tensions sharpened in medieval society. And it was not by the weapon of money alone that the burghers rose. Robbery, combat, pillage, family vendettas - all these played no less a role in the life of the urban population than among the warrior caste itself.

Take, for example, the fortunes of Mathieu d'Escouchy from Picardy, one of the many men of the fifteenth century to have written a chronicle. This chronicle might let us suppose him to have been a respectable man of letters devoting his talent to punctilious historical work. But if we try to find out something of his life from documentary evidence, a completely different picture emerges:

Alderman, then, towards 1445 provost, of Peronne, we find him from the outset engaged in a family quarrel with Jean Froment, the city syndic. They harass each other reciprocally with lawsuits, for forgery and murder, for 'exces et attemptaz.' The attempt of the provost to get the widow of his enemy condemned for witchcraft costs him dear. Summoned before the Parlement of Paris himself, d'Escouchy is imprisoned. We find him again in prison as an accused on five more occasions, always in grave criminal causes, and more than once in heavy chains. A son of Froment wounds him in an encounter. Each of the parties hires brigands to assail the other. After this long feud ceases to be mentioned in the records, others arise of similar violence. All this does not check the career of d'Escouchy: he becomes a bailiff, provost of Ribemont, 'procureur du roi' at Saint Quentin; he is ennobled. He is taken prisoner at Montlhery, then comes back maimed from a later campaign. Next he marries, but not to settle down to a quiet life. Once more, he appears accused of counter- feiting seals, conducted to Paris 'comme larron et murdrier,' forced into confessions by torture, prevented from appealing, condemned; then rehabilitated and again condemned, till traces of this career of hatred and

persecutions disappear from the records.1]

That is one example out of many. Consider, for another, the well-known miniatures from the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry. "For a long time it has been thought," says the editor,

and a number of people are still convinced of it today, that the miniatures of the fifteenth century were the creation of devout monks or pious nuns who worked in the peace of their cloisters. That is possible in certain cases. In general, however, it was completely different. It was worldly men, artisans, who executed these beautiful works, and the life of these secular artists was anything but edifying.12

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Again and again we hear of acts which by presentday standards would be branded as "crimes" and render the perpetrator socially "impossible." Two miniature painters accuse one another of theft; then one, with the help of his kinsmen, stabs the other in the street. And the Duc de Berry, who needs the murderer, must request an amnesty for him, a lettre de remission. Yet another abducts an eight-year old girl in order to marry her, against the will of her parents, naturally. These lettres de remission are filled with evidence of bloody feuds which often continue for many years and sometimes lead to real, savage battles in public places or in the countryside- and this held true for merchants and artisans as well as for knights.

The nobleman had, as in every country with a kindred social formation (for instance in the Scottish Highlands through the eighteenth century, in North- east Brazil through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan to this day), bands which followed him, ready for anything:

... All day long he is accompanied by servants and armed retainers to prosecute his vendettas... The roturiers, the burghers, cannot afford this luxury, but they have their 'kinsmen and friends,' who come to their aid, often in large numbers, equipped with all possible fearful weapons which the local town authorities prohibit in va'm; and when they have to avenge themselves, these citizens are de guerre, namely in a state of feud.13

Town governments sought in vain to make peace in these family feuds; the magistrates called the people before them, ordered civil peace, issued com- mands and ordinances. For a while it went well; then a new feud broke out, or an old one flared up again. Here are two partners who get into a dispute over a business matter; they quarrel; the conflict escalates; one day they meet in a public place, and one strikes the other dead.14 One innkeeper accuses another of stealing his clients; they become mortal enemies. One says a few nasty words about the other; it turns into a family war.

Family vendettas, then, not only existed among the noble-born; the towns of the fifteenth century were no less filled with private wars between families and cliques. Even the little people- hat makers, tailors, shepherds- they all had the knife quickly to hand. "It is well known how violent mores were until well into the fifteenth century, with what brutality passions were unleashed - despite the fear of hell, despite the bridle of class distinctions and the feeling of chivalrous honor, despite the fellowship and gaiety of social relations." 15

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Not that people were always going around with somber faces, narrowed brows, and martial airs as the outward symbols of their military prowess. On the contrary, they might drink together, exchange jokes and make fun of each other, then suddenly one word leading to another, they might be propelled from a jocular mood to the bitterest quarrel - and, for all we know, might after fighting and hurting one another, embrace again as dear friends. Much of what looks contradictory to us - the intensity of their devotion, their violent fear of hell, their feelings of guilt, their atonement, the immense outbursts of joy and mirth, the sudden flare-up and untamed force of their hatred and aggressiveness alternating with the utmost kindness and magnanimity - all these extremes of hatred and love, violence and repen- tance, are in fact symptoms of the same social and personality structure. The

play of instincts and emotions was more spontaneous, direct, and unstable than at later stages of the civilizing process. Only to us, for whom everything is more subdued, moderate, and calculated, and for whom social taboos are built much more deeply into the fabric of instinctual life as self-restraints, do the strength of this piety and the intensity of aggressiveness or cruelty appear antithetical. Religion, the awareness of the punishing and reward-giving omnipotence of God, by itself is never a "civilizing" or affect-subduing influence. Quite the contrary: religion is exactly as "civilized" as the human

beings who practice it. And thus, because in this society emotions were

expressed in a way we in our society can generally observe only among children, we call their manifestations and forms "childlike."

Wherever one looks into the documents of this time, one finds similar evidence: a life with an affect-structure different from our own, an existence without security, without overlong calculation for the future. Whoever did not love or hate with full force in this society, who did not hold his own in the interplay of passions, might as well go into a monastery; for he was quite as lost in worldly life as one who, conversely, in subsequent society, and

especially at court, would be unable to bridle his passions, to conceal and "civilize" his affects.

In both instances, it is the structure of society that requires and fosters a specific standard of affect-control. "We," as Luchaire says, "with our pacific customs and habits, with the solicitous protection the modern state bestows upon each individual's property and person,"16 can scarcely form an idea of this dissimilar society. In those days, the country fell into provinces, and the inhabitants of each province formed, so to speak, a small nation in itself which abhorred all others. These provinces in turn were again split up into a multitude of manors or fiefs, whose owners never ceased fighting each other. Not only the great lords, the barons, but also the petty castellans lived in

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wild isolation and were incessantly engaged making war against their "sovereigns," their peers, or their subjects. Moreover, there was a constant rivalry between towns, between villages, between valleys, and constant wars between neighbors, which seemed to spring forth from the very multiplicity of territorial units.

This tableau helps make vivid something which has often been asserted in this work as a general proposition, namely, the nexus of social structure and personality structure. We have here a society with no central power strong enough to compel restraint. And if, in one or another region, the strength of a central power happens to grow, people over a greater or smaller territory are compelled to live in peace with one another, then the patterning of the whole libidinal economy - drives, affects, emotions, and all - will, quite gradually, change as well. Then the relative restraint and "consideration of people for one another" gradually increases in everyday life, and the direct discharge of emotions in physical aggression becomes confined to specific enclaves in time and space. Once physical violence has been monopolized by central powers, not just anyone who chances to be strong can enjoy the pleasure of physical aggression, but only a few who (like the police against outlaws) are licensed to use violence by the central authority, and larger masses only in exceptional periods of military or revolutionary conflict, in socially legitimated struggle against external or internal enemies.

But even these enclaves of licensed violence in societies at a different stage of a civilizing process which allow greater latitude for aggression - above all wars between nations - have become increasingly impersonalized and lead less and less to affective discharges as immediate and forceful as those of the medieval phase. Even in these enclaves, the restraint and transformation of aggression fostered and made necessary by everyday life in such a society cannot just be broken at will. Yet this might happen more rapidly we surmise, perhaps, had not direct physical combat between a man and his hated adversary been converted into a mechanized struggle that requires a rigorous regulation of affects. Even at war in the civilized world at the present stage, the individual can seldom immediately give free rein to his lust for aggression, goaded by the sight of the enemy; rather, he must fight, regardless of his feelings, by order of leaders who themselves remain invisible, or only indirect- ly visible, and against an enemy who often enough remains invisible as well. And it requires tremendous social pressure and distress, as well as a constant stream of consciously directed propaganda, to rearouse and legitimate among large masses of people manifestations of strong affects that have been socially proscribed and repressed in everyday life - delight in killing and destruction.

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Still, these affects - in "refined" and rationalized form - have their legiti- mate and clearly circumscribed place even in the daily life of contemporary civilized society. And this aspect is quite characteristic of the kind of transformation that accompanies the civilization of the affect-economy. Battle lust and aggressiveness, for example, find socially permitted expression in the infighting of groups in society or, for that matter, in competitive sports. And they are manifest above all in "spectating," say, at boxing matches; in the daydream-like identification with some few people who, in a moderate and precisely regulated way, are allowed to act out such affects. This living out of affects in spectating or, for instance, just watching a murder film, is particularly characteristic of this kind of civilized society. It is crucial for the development of books and theater, and decisive for the role of the cinema in our world. Already in education, in the prescriptions for con- ditioning young people, originally active, pleasurable aggression is trans- formed into a more passive and restrained pleasure in spectating, consequent- ly into a mere visual enjoyment. Already in the 1774 edition of La Salle's Civilite it says, "Children love to touch with their hands clothes and other things that please them; it is necessary to correct this odious greed, and teach them to touch what they see only with their eyes."17

Since then, this has become a standard prescription. That it is denied him by

sociogenetic self-constraint, to grab spontaneously something he desires, loves, or hates, is one of the most marked characteristics of the "civilized" person. The imposition of this kind of restraint contributes greatly to the entire mold of his or her gestures - however different in detail the schema of their patterning may be in the various nations of the modern world.

Elsewhere it has been shown how, in the course of a process, use of the sense of smell or the tendency to sniff at food and other things, comes to be restricted as if it were something animalic. Here we see one of those inter- twinements (Verflechtungen) out of which another sense organ, the eye, acquires a quite specific importance in civilized society. Even more than the ear, it becomes the mediator of pleasure precisely because direct satisfactions of pleasurable desires have been narrowed down by a great number of prohibitions and restraints.

Even within the scope of this displacement of libidinal urges from direct action to watching, however, there is a distinct trend toward moderation and the "humanization" of affects. Compared with the visual delights of past phases, boxing is (to mention only this instance) a thoroughly tempered embodiment of transformed propensities to aggression and cruelty. A sixteenth-century example may illustrate. It has been picked out from a wide

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range of others because it demonstrates a visual satisfaction of cruelty in which delight in torture is made manifest with particular purity, without any rational justification or disguise as punishment or means of discipline.

In sixteenth-century Paris, part of the St. John's day festivities consisted in burning one or two dozen cats alive. This ceremony was widely renowned. The people assembled, and festive music was played. Under a sort of scaf- folding, an enormous fire was built. Then a sack or basket full of cats was suspended from the scaffold. The sack or basket began to glow, and the cats fell into the fire and burned while the crowd rejoiced in their cries and mewing. Usually the king and court were present. Sometimes the king or the dauphin was given the honor of lighting the pyre. And we hear that once, at tne special request of Charles IX, a fox was captured and burnt along with the cats.18

Now this spectacle is certainly no worse than burning heretics or torture and public executions of all sorts. It seems worse only because it reveals pleasure in the torment ofqiving beings that is so naked, undisguised, and free of any ulterior aim or excuse. The repugnance toward such enjoyments that the mere report of this institution arouses in us - and which must pass for normal by present-day standards of affect-regulation - once again demon- strates the transformation of the personality structure. At the same time it reveals another aspect of this transformation with particular clarity: much of what once aroused pleasure arouses displeasure today. Now, as then, this is not simply a matter of individual sensations. Burning cats on St. John's day was a social institution like boxing matches or horse races in our contem- porary society. In both cases, the pleasures society affords itself are embodiments of a social standard of affectivity that encompasses all variations of the affect-patterning of individuals; and whoever steps outside the bounds of that social standard is considered "abnormal" like, for instance, someone who wanted to satisfy his desire in a sixteenth-century manner, by burning cats. This is precisely because, in our phase of civiliza- tion, the normal conditioning of people restrains the expression of pleasure in such activity via the inculcation of anxiety as self-constraint. And this is, obviously, the simple psychological mechanism whereby the transformation of people's emotional life is effected: socially undesirable manifestations of pleasure-seeking drives are threatened and punished with measures that generate anxiety and Unlust. In that way, unpleasurable feelings that are socially generated battle with masked desire. It has been shown before from various aspects how in the course of a civilizing process the threshold of feelings of shame and revulsion advances. What has just been said refers to one of the mechanisms effecting this change.

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It remains to be considered more closely what were the changes in the overall

structure of society with which this change in personality structure went

hand in hand.

NOTES

1. A. Luchaire, La societe francaise au temps de Philippe Auguste (Paris, 1909), p. 273.

2. Ibid., p. 275. 3. Ibid., p. 272. 4. Ibid., p. 278. 5. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 30.

(Retranslated to preserve emphasis.) 6. Quoted ibid., p. 76. 7. H. Dupin, La courtoisie au moyen age (Paris, 1931), p. 79. 8. Ibid., p. 77. 9. Zarncke, Der deutsche Cato (Leipzig, 1852), p. 36f., V. 167/8 and V. 178/80.

10. Ibid., p. 48, V. 395ff. 11. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, pp. 29-30. 12. P. Durrieu, Les tres belles Heures de Notre Dame de Duc Jean de Berry (Paris,

1922), p. 68. 13. Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, Documents nouveaux sur les moeurs populaires et le droit de

vengeance dans les Pays-Bas au XVe siecle (Paris, 1908), p. 47. 14. Ibid., p. 162. 15. Ibid., p. 5. Emphasis added. 16. Luchaire, La societe francaise au temps de Philippe Auguste, p. 278f. 17. La Salle, Les regles de la bien-seance et de la civilite chretienne (Rouen, 1774), p.

23. 18. For more, consult A. Franklin, Paris et les parisiens au seizieme siecle (Paris, 1921),

p. 506f.

Theory and Society 5 (1978) 229-242 ? Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands