Elias and the bomb: earthing figurational sociology

This article asks what becomes of Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology when its developmental grammar of control - particularly over extra-human entities - is read from the standpoint of the nuclear Anthropocene. Elias treated the bomb largely as a Cold War symptom of human groups unable to master the dangers they create for one another. The article starts from a different premise: the bomb is more than a technological instrument or a fetish of interstate fear. As a technoscientific chimera, it becomes the critical figure for earthing figurational sociology: a threat that enters Earth materials and temporalities, returning through radioactive matter as a durable condition of future interdependencies. The article first revisits Elias’s theory of levels and the triad of controls, showing how biological and extra-human processes are integrated yet subordinated within a developmental hierarchy of security and danger. It then treats the bomb as a limit-case of figuration: an artefact produced within human interdependencies that, as an extra-human agent, can nevertheless reorganize valences, balances of power and the architecture of constraint. Finally, it follows the bomb through deep Earth temporalities, where the problem of control reappears as geological residue, planetary exposure and apocalyptic species imagination.