Crowds - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804754802 ISBN 13: 9780804754804

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Crowds explores the key role assumed by human multitudes in modern life by means of a graphically innovative, multi-author volume in which essays, word histories, and personal testimonies are woven together into a multiperspectival and multilayered group portrait. The portrait in question includes analyses of market crowds, crowds in modern art and literature, modern assemblies as compared to their premodern and ancient counterparts, modern sports crowds, human multitudes and mass media such as photography and cinema, crowds as political actors, and the emergence of crowd-centered discourses in social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Contributors include Stefan Jonsson, Allen Guttmann, Susanna Elm, John Plotz, Christine Poggi, William Egginton, Haun Saussy, Joan Ramon Resina, and Charles Tilly, with testimonies by authors such as Greil Marcus, Richard Rorty, Michel Serres, Alain Schnapp, Michael Hardt, T. J. Clark, and Susan Buck-Morss. The book represents the main output of one of the Stanford Humanities Lab's prototype "Big Humanities" projects and is supported by an extensive website (https://www.sup.org/media/crowds/) which includes virtual galleries, video capture of the November 2005 Crowds seminar, and a database of early social science readings on modern crowds.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. He is the author, most recently, of Building Fascism, Communism, Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca―Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford University Press, 2003). Matthew Tiews is the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

From the Back Cover

Crowds explores the key role assumed by human multitudes in modern life by means of a graphically innovative, multi-author volume in which essays, word histories, and personal testimonies are woven together into a multiperspectival and multilayered group portrait. The portrait in question includes analyses of market crowds, crowds in modern art and literature, modern assemblies as compared to their premodern and ancient counterparts, modern sports crowds, human multitudes and mass media such as photography and cinema, crowds as political actors, and the emergence of crowd-centered discourses in social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Contributors include Stefan Jonsson, Allen Guttmann, Susanna Elm, John Plotz, Christine Poggi, William Egginton, Haun Saussy, Joan Ramon Resina, and Charles Tilly, with testimonies by authors such as Greil Marcus, Richard Rorty, Michel Serres, Alain Schnapp, Michael Hardt, T. J. Clark, and Susan Buck-Morss. The book represents the main output of one of the Stanford Humanities Lab's prototype "Big Humanities" projects and is supported by an extensive website (http: //crowds.stanford.edu) which includes virtual galleries, video capture of the November 2005 Crowds seminar, and a database of early social science readings on modern crowds.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Crowds

By Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Matthew Tiews

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-5480-4

Contents

Introduction: A Book of Crowds Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews.......
ix
Abstracts..................................................................
xvii
1 Mob Porn Jeffrey T. Schnapp.............................................
1
2 The Invention of the Masses: The Crowd in French Culture from the 
Revolution to the Commune Stefan Jonsson..................................
47
3 Crowd Politics: The Myth of the 'Populus Romanus' Joy Connolly..........
77
4 Intimacy and Anonymity, or How the Audience Became a Crowd William 
Egginton...................................................................
97
5 Sports Crowds Allen Guttmann............................................
111
6 Captive Crowds: Pilgrims and Martyrs Susanna Elm........................
133
7 Movies and Masses Anton Kaes............................................
149
8 Mass, Pack, and Mob: Art in the Age of the Crowd Christine Poggi........
159
9 The Return of the Blob, or How Sociology Decided to Stop Worrying and 
Love the Crowd John Plotz.................................................
203
10 From Crowd Psychology to Racial Hygiene: The Medicalization of Reaction 
and the New Spain Joan Ramon Resina.......................................
225
11 Crowds, Number, and Mass in China Haun Saussy..........................
249
12 Market Crowds Urs Stäheli..............................................
271
13 WUNC Charles Tilly.....................................................
289
14 Far Above the Madding Crowd: The Spatial Rhetoric of Mass 
Representation Andrew V. Uroskie..........................................
307
15 Far from the Crowd: Individuation, Solitude, and 'Society' in the 
Western Imagination Jobst Welge...........................................
335
16 Agoraphobia: An Alphabet Jessica Burstein..............................
359
Afterword N. Katherine Hayles.............................................
377
Notes......................................................................
379
Index......................................................................
427

CHAPTER 1

Mob Porn

Jeffrey T. Schnapp

The sea has a voice, which is very changeableand almost always audible. It is a voicewhich sounds like a thousand voices, andmuch has been attributed to it: patience,pain, and anger. But what is most impressiveabout it is its persistence. The sea neversleeps; by day and by night it makes itselfheard, throughout the years and decadesand centuries. In its impetus and its rage itbrings to mind the one entity which sharesthese attributes in the same degree: that is,the crowd.

—ELIAS CANETTI, Crowds and Power (1981)

THE Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia was the lavish mass distribution monthlyto which readers of Italian fascism's official daily could turn for photographs andarticles on current events much like Americans could turn to Life magazine, Russiansto Ogonek, and the Chinese to China Reconstructs. Starting in the mid-1920s,the Rivista underwent a graphic makeover; among the changes introduced was theinclusion of large-format foldouts—panoramic photographs, typically two to sixtimes wider than the standard page size. Foldouts were not uncommon in periodmagazines and, as with 1960s foldouts of Playboy bunnies, they were understoodas graphic highlights detachable for purposes of display in the home or workplace.What first drew my attention to the Rivista's foldouts, however, was the object ofdesire draped across the picture plane: teeming, seemingly infinite multitudes rallyingaround a visible or invisible leader, tightly packed into architectural settingsrepresentative of the great historical cities of the Italian peninsula. The politicalrally as source of vicarious photo- or pornographic thrill: such was the graphicprinciple that would inform the next fifteen years of the Rivista Illustrata's practice—years during which wave upon wave of innovative artists and graphic designerslaid out its pages, among them Bruno Munari, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero,Giò Ponti, and Xanti Schawinsky. The graphic environment shifted with eachsuccessive wave, but not the foldouts. Mass rally after mass rally unfolded in everynumber, right up to the collapse of the fascist regime.

The obvious explanation for this persistence was the foldout's propaganda value.The Rivista was more than an Italian Life magazine. It was a semiofficial partyorgan, a material conduit between the legions of citizens wedged into squaresand Italian public opinion, whose aim was to promote the image of fascist Italyas a perpetually mobilized modern nation under the ruleof a perpetually mobile modern leader. Yet the notion ofpropaganda raises more questions than it answers ("propaganda"being the label assigned to forms of mass persuasionto which one is averse). It tells one next to nothing aboutthe nature of the images placed in circulation or about thecontours of the sociopolitical imaginary that they hoped totap into and shape. Nor does it address the larger questionof where and how photographic panoramas of the massesfit into the broader stream of crowd images that arises inEuropean culture in the wake of the American and Frenchrevolutions, a topic first broached by interwar culture criticssuch as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, andby postwar art historians such as Wolfgang Kemp, but stillacutely in need of the sort of in-depth analysis provided bythe present volume and by its companion exhibition andcatalog, Revolutionary Tides. Last but not least, the invocationof a propagandistic function doesn't help one to understandhow and why panoramic representations of politicalmultitudes became intertwined with experimentaltypography and the art of photomontage and, with slightalthough significant variations, circulated not only in interwarItaly, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, andthe Soviet Union, but also in the postwar period from theChinese Cultural Revolution to the protest movements ofthe 1960s through the 1990s.

So the topic of this essay (as well as of RevolutionaryTides) is that literal specter of the Enlightenment known asthe revolutionary crowd, hovering between reason and hallucination,between the emancipatory dreams of 1789 andthe terror of 1792. It addresses the question of how revolutionarycrowds were translated into graphic elements in amedia landscape transformed by the spread of inexpensiveindustrial photolithography, the electronic transmission ofphotographic images to press agencies, the rise of live mediasuch as radio, and the emergence of visual-verbal hybridssuch as photojournalism and newsreels. The processof translation is not reducible to a single story line. Viewedfrom the standpoint of artistic technique, it is the tale of anevolving repertory of illustrational, painterly, photographic,and photojournalistic practices that gradually reshapedthe once text- and print-based public sphere. Viewed froman art-historical standpoint, it is the story of a complex ofdifferentiated but overlapping iconographies of the crowdand of their place within the history of panoramic modesof representation. Viewed from an intellectual-historicalstandpoint, it is the story of how these practices and iconographieswere influenced by millennium-long habits ofmetaphorizing, gendering, and abstracting human crowds,central to political philosophy at least as early as Aristotleand as late as Elias Canetti. Viewed from a sociopoliticalstandpoint, the story is that of the rise of a politics foundedon principles of popular sovereignty and of the consequentneed for new images and mythologies of the collectivityas well as models of political action and agencybased on the physical massing of bodies in public spaces orthe performance of symbolic marches and mobilizationsin real space and time. It is a multilayered tale, in short, asdifficult to contain within the bounds of a single essay asare the oceanic masses enframed within the foldouts of theRivista Illustrata, here woven together into four narrativeunits bearing the subtitles "Tides," "Types," "Tiles," and"Spillways." "Tides" concerns the oceanic metaphor as appliedto crowds. "Types" sketches out the history of whatwill be referred to as "emblematic" crowd images. "Tiles"describes the development of "oceanic" human panoramaswith respect to the prior emblematic tradition. "Spillways"deals with the transformation of "oceanic" fragments backinto geometrical emblems in the context of modernistphotomontage. The essay concludes with some reflectionson the contemporary roles assumed by multitudes: on theone hand, their enduring function as sources of experiencesof ecstasy and thrill in the domains of leisure andentertainment; and on the other, their increasing eclipseby virtual counterparts in the politic conflicts of postindustrialsocieties.

Tides

The phrase la folla oceanica (the oceanic mass) was the labelapplied by both viewers and producers to the Rivista Illustratafoldouts. The phrase is ubiquitous in early twentieth-centuryItalian political discourse, and nowhere moreso than in fascist oratory, where it served to enforce fascism'sclaim that it alone knew how to catalyze and to channel themighty and mysterious forces that characterized the era ofcrowds. The "era of crowds" was the definition of modernityproposed in Gustave Le Bon's 1895 classic Psychologie desfoules and in the works of crowd psychology that influencedit by authors such as Hippolyte Taine and Gabriel Tarde, aswell as by members of the Italian Positivist school (EnricoFerri, Cesare Lombroso, Scipio Sighele, Pasquale Rossi)."While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing,while the old pillars of society are giving way one byone," Le Bon affirmed with apocalyptic intent, "the powerof the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and ofwhich the prestige is continually on the increase." Premodernmultitudes had long been imagined as elemental hordesto be shaped and subjugated from on high; modern multitudeswere instead the volatile protagonists of a volatileera, leaders themselves as well as breeding grounds for newforms of leadership and individualism. Nothing menacedtheir power because of an inherent heterogeneity and instability.They were the result of the promiscuous interminglingand physical massing of social classes, age groups, races,nationalities, and genders along the great boulevards ofthe industrial metropolis. Their prestige was continually onthe increase because everything modern was potentially attheir beck and call: political authority, the state, commerce,communications, culture, economic production. Broughtinto being thanks to the loss of conscious personality thatwas purported to occur when human bodies agglomerate,the modern crowd is not reducible to the average of the individualsthat make it up. Rather, it sets off a chain reactionlike those that fascinated Le Bon in his writings on atomicparticles: "just as in chemistry certain elements, whenbrought into contact—bases and acids, for example—combineto form a new body possessing properties quite differentfrom those of the bodies that have served to form it," soit is with the crowd. His socialist counterpart Ferri sharedthe same thought:

Collective psychology concerns not the simple mixing of individualelements, but rather their chemical combination. This meansthat the resulting psychic collective is not equal to the sum of itsindividual psychic parts (and this is the case both on the plane offeelings and that of ideas). On the contrary, it is always different,either for the better or for the worse, in precisely the same manneras a chemical combination of two or more substances conferson the final mass a temperature that is higher or lower than thatof the bodies that make it up.

The properties in question are the result of multiple liquidscombined in a single test tube always with an uncertainoutcome: an explosion, a surge of energy, instantaneous decay,new fermentations.

In Psychologie des foules Le Bon rarely assimilates themodern mob to tides, open seas, or ocean storms becausehe didn't need to. The association was firmly establishedin the western sociopolitical imagination long before theRivista Illustrata foldouts were routinely imagined as portraitsof human oceans, and long before Scipio Sigheleprobed the criminal crowd as a "perilous sea ... whosesurfaces are whipped up by every psychological wind."This is attested to in a wide array of nineteenth-centuryliterary sources. Early instances are William Wordsworth'sperception of London, in The Prelude or the Growth of aPoet's Mind, as a

perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end,

and Thomas De Quincey's hallucinatory vision of the Londoncityscape as an ocean "paved with innumerable faces,upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing,surg[ing] upwards by the thousands, by myriads,by generations, by centuries." Other accounts are lessnightmarish, like "the tumultuous sea of human heads" thatfills the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Manof the Crowd" with "a delicious novelty of emotion," andCharles Baudelaire's seminal writings on the industrial metropolis,where modern individualism is made to hinge ona dandy-bather navigating his way through aquatic multitudes.10 The metaphor has become a constant by the end ofthe nineteenth century, shaping everything from Emile Zola'sand J.-K. Huysmans's evocations of spectral urban (Paris)and rural (Lourdes) crowds, to Guy de Maupassant's elitistreflections in Sur l'eau (On the Face of the Water) on howindividual wills blend with the common will like "a dropof water is blended with and lost in a river," to the promiselodged at the climax of the 1909 Founding Manifesto ofFuturism that futurists will "sing the multicolored and polyphonictidal waves of revolution in modern capitals."

The "oceanic crowd" is, in point of fact, far more ancient,traceable at least as far back as the long-standing conflationin Greco-Roman culture of turbulence, whether maritime,meteorological, or political, with the turba ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), whichis to say, the mob. The pairing animates much of ancientpolitical theory as, for example, the characteristic passagein Cicero's De re publica, where he asserts that "there is nosea so hard to calm and no fire so hard to check as the vengeanceof the unrestrained mob." (Better, accordingly, tobuild cities destined for permanence and imperial might,like Athens and Rome, at a slight remove from the oceanand its proletarian tides.) The figure recurs in a celebratedsimile from the opening book of Virgil's Aeneid:

And just as, often, when a crowd of peopleIs rocked by a rebellion, and the rabble [ignobile vulgus]Rage in their minds, and firebrands and stonesFly fast—for fury finds its weapons—if,By chance, they see a man remarkableFor righteousness and service, they are silentAnd stand attentively; and he controlsTheir passion by his words and cools their spirits:So all the clamor of the sea subsided. (Aeneid 1, vv. 149–55)

In ancient thought, the man "remarkable for righteousnessand service" (pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum), thequeller of revolutionary tumults and navigator of stormyseas, the gubernator, is radically unlike, radically "other" to,the always feminized rabble. He is a godlike being like thegoddess-born hero of Virgil's epic, pius Aeneas; a subduer ofhis passions and the passions of others, not a fomenter. LeBon and his Italian counterparts are well aware that whatchanges in the era of industry is less the volatility of thecrowd or a newly favorable characterization of this volatilitythan the lineage of this superior being. No longer themonarch, the aristocrat, or the godlike man; no longer thetyrant imagined as the rabble's monstrous counterpart; heis the man of the crowd, at once immanent and transcendent,at once an insider and an outsider, at once Everymanand the exceptional individual who provides the masseswith a singular identity, a singular face, a mirror image ofa sovereign collectivity that never sleeps. Fully swept up inthe multicolored and polyphonic waves of modern revolution,he is able to channel their tidal fury toward higher andnobler ends: national sovereignty, liberty, empire, progress.

An early name of his is Leviathan, as famously figuredin the 1651 frontispiece illustrating the Hobbesian principleof contractual political representation according to whichthe sovereign is simultaneously understood as the powerthat forces individual citizens into a single body politicand as the expression of their collective will (fig. 1.1).The body of citizens that composes Leviathan's body, whatHerbert Spencer referred to as the macanthrope, is made upof the natural motions of individual minds whose interactiongives rise to an ideal collective motion signaled by areciprocal exchange of gazes. The multitude faces its ownvisage and vice versa in an act of mirroring that allows forno fundamental ontological gap between leader and led.This orderly model of the formation of the body politicwill provide one of the richest veins for panoramic representationsof the type that I will subsequently refer to as theemblematic.

The emblematic mass so pervades the history of westerngroup portraiture until the modern era that exceptions areusually limited to battlefield scenes (from ancient Greekred-figure vases to Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano)or to representations of the unruly damned being herdedby infernal taskmasters (Luca Signorelli's Orvieto frescos ofthe Last Judgment). What prevails instead are the geometricallyarrayed choirs that surround the Redeemer in vasttableaux of total order like Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified inthe Court of Heaven and Giotto's Arena Chapel Last Judgment,along with secular avatars. Liquidity is a secondaryfeature of the emblematic mass. It is present to the degreerequired for individuals to lose their contours in order toregain them within the confines of a single corporate body.It serves as a vehicle less for the loss of boundaries betweenindividuals than for the triumph of (collective) Form: symbolicin premodern cultures—the mobs of the blessed inLast Judgment scenes form spheres, ladders, and celestialtrees; abstract, mechanical, or "ornamental" (as Kracauerwould have it) in the modern era. The emblematic massis but the tradition-bound, dry-land counterpart of the oceanicmass, and to set sail on the latter, a more dynamic cognitivemodel is required that would allow the sovereign individualto emerge while being immersed in the mob, tocontrol while being controlled. The model in question isprovided by theorizations of the sublime.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Crowds by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Matthew Tiews. Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804754802
• ISBN 13: 9780804754804
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464
• Editor: Schnapp Jeffrey T., Tiews Matthew