CROWDS AND POWER

A review of Elisa Canetti's landmark interdisciplinary work, Crowds and Power

Crowds and Power, Elias Cannetti’s idiosyncratic, hybrid work of social science, anthropology and philosophy, first published in 1960, now reissued in a very handsome edition by Fitzcarraldo, enquires into the very essence of human nature and concludes that man is a fearful animal, and that this fear manifests itself in crowds, packs, commands, the lust for power and domination, blows, murder, despotism and paranoia. In crowds, all distinctions are erased, all are equal in their loss of self, are no longer prey in danger of being killed, and act according to mimesis, emotional contagion and primal instinct.

According to Canetti, crowds are enlargements of ‘packs’, ‘baiting packs’ and ‘hunting packs’, which he says are ‘crowd crystals’, “units of action” that “serve to precipitate crowds”, whilst ‘increase packs’ are “the specific propelling force behind the spread of men. It has conquered the earth for him and has led to ever richer civilisations”, a remark implying that colonialism is a refined biological impulse, but also that “the spread of men” and the growth of civilisations are bad things.

Fear, according to Canetti, is the primal emotion, the atavistic fear of being, as he has it, touched, seized, eaten, incorporated and finally excreted by predators, and is the state of being responsible, ultimately, for the growth of civilisations. However, Canetti offers no explanation as to why, if this fundamental human emotion of fear is constitutive and universal, civilisations did not then grow on all continents, and why some remained primitive until they encountered those that were not.

For Canetti, the libido plays no part in ego formation, and thus the libidinal is entirely absent from the book, as is Freud himself, bar a brief footnote, though Canetti does share with Freud, however, is that the element of speculation is dominant throughout the book. The ego is formed not by sexuality but with the ‘stings’ left behind and inside by commands: “in every case of command, something remains ... It is this that I have called The Sting ... from his earliest days stings of all kinds accumulate inside him and it is around these that form the compulsions and pleasures of his later life. ... They are what drives him towards that otherwise inexplicable need for meaningless relationship". The crowd offers temporary relief to the command-stung psyche; when in a crowd “not only can no new stings be formed, but all the old ones are got rid of for the time being. It is as though people has slipped out of their houses, leaving their stings piled in the cellars.” A less heated perspective might accommodate the necessity of commands, which are request that must be fulfilled. Must, not just in terms of obedience and hierarchy, but because if they are not obeyed something will go wrong, something that needs doing will not be done. It is then a matter of whether a command is rational or irrational, reasonable or unreasonable, necessary or given for-its-own sake out malice. Such matters determine whether a sting is left behind, and its size.

Elias Canetti

Canetti’s method is excavatory and genealogical, though there is no mention of Nietzsche, or of his notion of a ‘herd morality’. This is not surprising, as Nietzsche was the philosopher of joy, affirmation and amor fati, whereas Crowds and Power is one of lament and passionate anger. More surprising is that there is no mention of any other theorists of the crowd, such as Max Weber of Gustav le Bon. The work that most heavily informs the book is Specimens of Bushman Folklore, published in 1911, dated and forgotten even by 1960, and a scattering other, equally dated, early twentieth century anthropological studies. It is the examples from history and anthropology that constitute the books longeurs and dissipate the books’ propulsive force and harsh, corvine music. Thus, we get nine pages on the Muharram Festival of the Shiites, several pages on the Greek Festival of Easter, but nothing on the Nuremberg rallies, long passages on the long-gone Boilok Folk of the Congo, the Tlinkit Indians of Alaska and the Jivaros of South America, but nothing on Soviet Russia or Maoist China, and barely any mention of the horrors of the two world wars through which Canetti had lived.

Canetti won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1981, despite having only written one novel, Auto da Fe, in 1935,along with journals, travelogues, essays, and his highly original short study of Kafka’s letters, Kafka’s Other Trial (1967). But it is Crowds and Power he regarded as his Lebenswerk, and the book was the labour of more than thirty-five years. Its immediate inspiration was his witnessing a workers’ demonstration in Frankfurt in 1925, and must have been informed by Freikorps and Brownshirts hunting the streets in roaming packs looking for Jews or workers to beat to death in the run-up to the Reich, and the later mass rallies of the Nazi party. Canetti was himself a Bulgarian-born Sephardic Jew who fled Austria for Britain after the Anschluss (ironically, in his personal life Canetti was a dominating bully and sadist, so, all-too conversant with command, some of his acute insights about human motivation are informed by experience.

At its best the book is a barrage of declarative sentences, sharp jabbing insights into human motivation, and bitter Rouchefoucauldian Maxims such as “A war is not a war unless its first aim is a heap of the enemy dead”, or “A despot is always aware of his inner malevolence and therefore must dissimulate”. His method is analogical, metaphorical, and metonymic, that is to say, poetic, and this is a poet’s book, not a social scientist’s or anthropologist’s.  It is a profoundly anti-humanist work for it denies humans rational agency, and amalgamates humanity and animality, viewing the latter as something only menacing, savage, and dark.

The book, organised into short, discrete sections, and resembles Adorno’s Minima Moralia, another catastrophe cursed, aphoristic work of Expressionist sociology darkened by the shadow of Nazism, the bomb, and the Final Solution. The resemblance is not just formal, but some of his remarks are also akin to some of Adorno’s more paranoid exaggerations, such as his ‘fascist’ doorhandles and window fittings. Both single out laughter as a related to primordial murderousness: “laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of food”, Canetti writes, whilst he characterises eating in a restaurant as a “contest of repletion”, during which “everyone can watch everyone else’s teeth”, observations akin to the those of one of Thomas Bernhard’s dyspeptic (but crucially, ironic or possibly mad) narrators.

According to Canetti, humankind became humankind through the observation and incorporation of animality, “he incorporated into himself, by transformations, all the animals he knew. It was through the development of these transformations that he really became man”. Seen in this light, progression is illusory, and it’s notable that there is no mention in the book of Marx or Hegel, for Canetti sees no teleology or dialectic at work, not even a negative one, only chaos and reactive, primal instinct, refined through technology. Our unique, advanced consciousness melding with animal instinct produced a kind of hybrid creature, so that there was already something androidal about us even before the first screen-human hybrids of Millennials and Gen Z. (The animal realm proper is of course one of Necessity only, animals are innnocent even as they, bite, tear and consume flesh; in its metaphorical sense only humans can act be 'bestial'.

In a startling passage in the book’s most compelling chapter, The Entrails of Power, Canetti says that “power is the absolute evil”, that civil society is a manipulation of and consequence of it, and that the ultimate purpose of power is, after the victim has been seized and incorporated, to reduce others, and ultimately, everything, to shit, to nothing: “The road that prey travels through the body is a long one and on the way all of its substance is sucked out of it; everything is useful is abstracted from it until all that remains is refuse and stench”.

In his section on crowd symbols, Canetti claims that armies are the result of humankind’s mimicking of forests, but the comparison of a forest with an army is merely a simile or metaphor, not an insight into nature of armies. A forest is similar to an army, but it’s too much to say that armies modelled upon them. Not only are they organised into discrete battalions and are mobile, but they are also found in countries without forests. With the knife and the arrow being directly based on the finger, he’s on surer ground: “The tip of the finger”, he writes “is pointed and armoured with a nail that has provided man with the sensation of stabbing. From it developed the dagger, which is a harder and more pointed finger”. Of teeth he writes, “One is tempted to call teeth the very first manifestation of order ... it is probable that teeth served as the model for the improvement of his tools ... smoothness and order, the manifest attributes of the teeth, have entered into the very nature of power ... the order of military formations, which is artificially created by man himself, is in myth connected with teeth ... which are guardians of the mouth.”

“Commands”, he writes “are older than speech”; yet the same can be said for every basic type of verbal locution, all of them have had their preverbal form, so that a declaration of love is also “older than speech”. There’s no denying the harms of harsh and irrational command and the stings they leave behind, but this is not the same as saying that they’re wholly constitutive of the ego, but are only partly so, for some people. Many will recognise, some from their own childhoods, the bleak picture of parenting, and the role of commands within it, that he gives. It is undoubtedly the case that childhood is a living hell for many children, actual abuse aside, which is common, the manifestly unfair way in which many treat their young children obviously leave their psychological marks, their stings. And if some become parents because they’re full of love and the desire for unconditional love, others desire unlimited power, to act the tyrant, and wish to work out their cruelty and sadism without fear of retaliation. “The concentration of the appetite for domination on such a small organism”, he writes, “gives rise to a feeling of superiority greater than that obtained in any other habitual relationship between human beings. She [the mother] is occupied day and night with domination and the enormous number of details by which it is expressed gives it a roundness and perfection which no other kind of power achieves. It is not confined to giving orders, for these cannot be understood by a very young child. It means that a creature is kept prisoner, even though in this case genuinely for its own advantage”. It's interesting that as an Austrian of his time he focuses on mothers: Klaus Theweleit near the close of his two-volume study of masculinity and misogynistic fantasy in the run-up to the Reich, Male Fantasies, remarks that Germani and Austrian fathers had barely any contact with thier sons and that the parenting, the disciplining, that formed and deformed their psyches was inflicted on them almost exclusively by their mothers or other femal carers. He opens the door ajar to give us a glimpse of this elephant in the room, then slams it shut on us.

Organised religion, and especially Catholicism, are seen in Crowds and Power as a herding of the crowd, and a taming of its potential for violence “... the feeling of unity is dispensed in doses and the continuance of the church depends upon the rightness of the dosage to the crowds through ritual. Its aim is to arouse communal veneration among the faithful”. Islam, of all the religions, he singles out for censure, describing it as The Religion of War. Roberto Callasso in discussing its terrorist arm in a Paris Review interview - and which other religion even has a terrorist arm - tentatively called attention to Islam’s ‘violent spirit’ and was accused of Islamophobia, and perhaps this section of Crowds and Power will not go down so well in some quarters. Of Muslims he writes, “Everything that happens to them is direct expression of god’s will. Thus, all their lives, they find fresh occasion to submit. It is as though they were already in god’s mouth, to be crushed in the next instant .... The state of expectation of command coming so early in life, they surrender for good and all, it marks them deeply and also has a momentous effect on their attitudes to other people. It creates a soldierly type of believer whose life is a battle.”

The undramatic truth is that most people rarely, if ever join a crowd, and their motives for doing so vary, and often enough it is a matter of cumpulsion, not choice, even if that compulsion is something like family loyalty (say, a wedding crowd). And often crowds are are a matter of pleasure-seekeng rather than fear assuagement or desiring a loss of self, and one can encounters within them other individualities, rather than joining a magmatic human blob, and crowds can be somewhere people to go to find human connection, romanc, sex. People move to cities, which are diffused crowds, paradocially for the liberation of anonymity, away from village or small time probing eyes and poisoned tongues, but at the same to meet more, and more interesting, people. Yes, there are hunting and baiting pack still, but any types of pack are also benign - the young out-on-the-pull pack, the hobby pack, the sports pack, and so on, and so Canetti's phenomenology of both crowds and powers, both in terms of typology and motivation, is far from complete.

The remotest roots of civilisations are in agon, violence, pain and blood. Lamenting this seems futile. In a startling insight Canetti says that “the earliest writing he [humankind] learnt to read was [animal] tracks. It was a kind of notation presented on the soft ground, and as he read it, he was connected with the sound of its formation”. Yes, this tracking of mammals led to their deaths (they are also hunters and killers), but also to protein, the satisfaction of human hunger and the development of the species; the birth of reading and writing in animal tracking therefore does not seem to me to be a dark tragedy of our remote past; we had to kill to eat and evolve.

Violence, power and hierarchy are inherent to humanity, and if they are curses, they will never to be lifted. At the book’s close Canetti writes, “If we would master power and face command openly and boldly, and search for the means to deprive it of its sting”. Here he has weakened and fallen into the hope trap, given in to the terroristic idea that that things could and ought to be different, an idea that, ironically led to history’s most destructive crowd manifestations. We can and should ameliorate the accidentals, through social organisation on the plane of history, but there’s no possible final silencing of our substance, the demons that howl in our blood, and we can concur with Montaigne in evaluating this book that “of our sickness, the most savage is to despise out being.”

Crowds and Power is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, priced £18.99

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