I am continuing to read Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. I find that I can only read 3 or 4 pages at a time. The prose is so specific, every sentence has such weight, and what he calls up in my mind is so powerful – that if I read too much in one sitting, it all starts to blend together. I lose the sharpness of what is going on, what he describes.
He writes about crowd behavior – in every single permutation you can imagine. He leaves no stone unturned. I think about crowds in terms of either urban areas, or in terms of revolutions, and historical upheavals. Storming the Bastille, the Nazis, the genocide in Rwanda, countless other examples. The crowd mentality obviously plays a huge part in such events.
But Canetti uses a wide wide lens. He doesn’t just focus on the “mobs” storming the palace gates. He talks about religion. He talks about the “crowd of the dead”, which pretty much every society and every civilization has. The relationship that the living have with their ancestors. He talks about women and men. The symbiotic nature of these two crowds, and how – even in groups widely divergent and separated by continents – similar rituals evolve. He talks about religion a lot. He talks about war. The crowd mentality in wars.
I am now getting into what he calls “crowd symbols”, a term made up by Canetti – He describes “crowd symbols” thus:
Crowd symbols is the name I give to collective units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds.
He has come up with 11 such symbols: Corn, rivers, forest, rain, wind, sand, fire, the sea, the heap, stone heaps, treasure. I’m just at the beginning of this section, but I can imagine that these crowd symbols become crucial later in the book. For example, Canetti briefly posits that we can fully understand the nation of Great Britain if we fully understand that their “crowd symbol” is the “sea”. It is a certain kind of nation that would have the “sea” as its symbol, an island nation perhaps, an adventuring nation. Canetti goes deeper into the collective metaphors for all of these concrete objects, metaphors which are common to all humanity.
Canetti talks about such “symbols” as indicative of the different aspects of crowd behavior. Like: Rivers are like crowds as the crowds are gathering, as the crowd is converging, from many streams into one current. Rivers are relatively static, they rarely jump their banks and flood over, the way is clear, everyone is one, and the crowd is moving together as one.
Canetti makes an enormous distinction, by the way, between “crowds” and “packs”. Packs have their own section. “Crowds” are a completely different phenomenon.
(See why I can only read a couple pages at a time?)
For those of you who are interested here is a brief excerpt, where Canetti describes the attributes of every crowd.
Every crowd has these attributes, only some in a more obvious way than others.
The Attributes of the Crowd
Before I try to undertake a classification of crowds it may be useful to summarize briefly their main attributes. The following four traits are important.1. The crowd always wants to grow. There are no natural boundaries to its growth. Where such boundaries have been artificially created – e.g. in all institutions which are used for the preservation of closed crowds – an eruption of the crowd is always possible and will, in fact, happen from time to time. There are no institutions which can be absolutely relied on to prevent the growth of the crowd once and for all.
2. Within the crowd there is equality. This is absolute and indisputable and never questioned by the crowd itself. It is of fundamental importance and one might even define a crowd as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant. It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.
3. The crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense. Nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; everything must be the crowd itself. The feeling of density is strongest in the moment of discharge [Ed: This is the moment when, in Canetti’s theory, a crowd actually coheres into a crowd. Once there was nothing, now there is a crowd. “Discharge” is the moment when that happens.] One day it may be possible to determine this density more accurately and even to measure it.
4. The crowd needs a direction It is in movement and it moves towards a goal. The direction, which is common to all its members, strengthens the feeling of equality. A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd. It’s constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal. A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.
There is, however, another tendency hidden in the crowd, which appears to lead to new and superior kinds of formation. The nature of these is often not predictable.
