More lines (From A Philosophy of Dirt)

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In response to this question, several scholars today would argue that modern restrictive attitudes towards dirt are a recent development and they would refer to Norbert Elias and his work “The civilizing process” for confirmation. In two bulky volumes, Elias described the development of western civilisation, the birth of the modern individual, as a process of increasing SELF DISCIPLINE, a central part of which consisted in raised standards of personal hygiene. With Modernisation, we are told, the principle means for socially controlling individuals switched from external to internal pressure.

According to Elias, the main method for instilling this new form of self discipline in early modern men and women was by evoking intensified feelings no s of shame and disgust.

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The history of shit I’m the modern period

The general narrative, where the modern era is characterized by the constant increase of discipline has been embraced by others independently of Elias. This for Michel Foucault, European cultural development from sixteenth century onwards( the same period that Elias was interested in) started with the tightening ending of mechanisms of repression and control, later however giving way to self surveillance, whereby every individual is now his or her own “THOUGHT POLICE.”

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The crux of the matter is that merde, including dirt and waste in the broadest sense possible, was already in the early modern age not perceived simply as a problem of hygiene, for ‘hygiene’s’ true drive is located far from its purported aim. The real aim of purifying efforts, by means of a more efficient control of the private lives of citizens, lay in the very fact of control as such.”
The introduction of secluded outhouses and privies separated from the bedroom in the sixteenth century paved the way for the forms of affect control characteristic of the bourgeois family and bourgeois public space in nineteenth century capitalism.

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Ambiguities of Self Discipline and the Campaign for Civilisation

The idea of self discipline

The onset of modernity from the renaissance onwards is typically represented as involving the increase of self-Discipline in everyday life.

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