ABSTRACT
Drawing on Elias’s (1982) account of the ‘civilizing’ process as a historical and conceptual phenomenon, and echoing the Katzian argument, O’Malley and Mugford contend that the increasing need for ‘moral transcendence’ through excitement should be seen largely as a product of social and cultural conditions brought about by the ‘emergence of rationality’ (‘Only in a society where there exist effective barriers to spontaneous expression of emotional extremes will a process of moral self-transcendence be called for’ (O’Malley and Mugford 1994: 199)). More specifically, they put forward three (distinctly modernist) themes that they believe both account for the current crisis in ontology and help explain ‘the dilemma of the modern self, and the way that excitement is relevant to that dilemma’ (1994: 201) – alienation, commodification and the prevalence of ‘clock time’ (specifically, Eliade’s ‘fall into time’, the artificial division of time between work and leisure). Such features create a situation in which transgression takes on a peculiar appeal:
As commodification proceeds apace, the world becomes dominated by style, by appearance, by simulacra. In such a world, the self becomes swallowed in consumerism, but that consumerism is ultimately rather hollow and unsatisfying. The pursuit of selfhood may involve seeking liberation through consumption by indulging in more extreme forms of experience, but in so doing one risks more conformity to the consumerist perspective ... Within modern cultures there is a steady and increasing pressure towards emotionally exciting activities, as a source of transcendence and authenticity with which to offset the suffocation of an over-controlled, alienated existence within the mundane reality of modern life. (1994: 206)
Thus, O’Malley and Mugford are able to convey precisely how Katz’s work on emotions is relevant to social conditions today and why transgressive behaviour is so ‘seductive’ and/or ‘exciting’ for the ‘subject in transition’. They also provide more than a glimpse of the ratchet mechanisms in which the very processes of overcoming or escaping banality themselves become bound up in mechanisms of control and conformity.
