Grounded on Foucault's suggestion that discourses are not just referential or representational systems, but part of the infrastructure ordering practices in a society, this article analyzes transformations in the etiquette literature in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. It claims that the transformations undergone by etiquette books at the time involved not only a change in the substance of manners but also in their format, and it shows how this change in format embodied and helped deploy an (...) infrastructure of social relations constituted by a logic of decenteredness, as opposed to a logic of centeredness. The article discusses both the theoretical issues raised by the concept of an infrastructure of social relations and methodological points concerning the use of etiquette books for social research, and raises some analytical questions regarding our understanding of American history at the time, as well as our more general conceptions of modernity and postmodernity. In order to reinforce its general argument concerning the embeddedness of an infrastructure of social relations in discourse, and to help clarify the idea of a logic of decenteredness, the article also illustrates how etiquette books from a much earlier period embodied and deployed a logic of centeredness. (shrink)

This article argues that the life-works of Norbert Elias and Franz Borkenau can best be understood together, as they were developed in close interaction during the 1930s. Deriving inspiration from Freud, they took up the project formulated by Weber at the end of his `Anticritical Last Word'. However, in two significant respects they went beyond the Weberian problematics. First, overcoming the centrality attributed to economic concerns, they rooted the Western civilizing process in the long-term attempt to harness the violence that (...) was escalated by the emergence and then collapse of the Roman Empire. Second, they emphasized the crucial importance of periods of transition that follow an overall dissolution of order and mark the possible future course of events. (shrink)

In recent years Singapore has come to be seen as a successful project of economic transformation and capitalist development. What is more remarkable - but less discussed - is Singapore's success in building a multiethnic society and the unique concomitant civilizing processes that have accompanied this. Singapore represents today a project of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural polity and a postmodern global city that combines civility, nostalgia and economic functionality. Here it is argued that - despite some well-known and decisive dark (...) spots on the political landscape - this success has to do with two concomitant processes. One is the functionally administered extension of the state into the meaning-sphere of the individual, totalizing it from within his own nostalgia in an exoticized urban space. The other is the soteriological transcendence of individual and intra-individual relations within and beyond the culturally recognized `communities'. Westerners will not be able to learn from the Singapore process of multi-cultural civilization should they continue to merely understand it in terms of `Asian authoritarianism'. (shrink)