The Ambiguous Multiplicities

Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations

A. Mubi Brighenti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137384997
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book proposes a historical-conceptual journey into the cluttered social formations that have remained outside of mainstream sociology. In particular, it reviews urban crowds, mediated publics, global masses, population, the sovereign people and the multitude and addresses the question: 'What is the building block of the social?'.

1

Multiplicities Old and New

Abstract: At the end of the nineteenth century, two famous predictions were advanced for the twentieth century: while Le Bon prophesied that the coming century would have been the age of crowds, Tarde replied that the new century would have been the age of publics. Even in retrospect, it is not easy to tell who was right, and which collective formation actually became predominant.

Keywords: crowds; cultural history; publics; social multiplicities; social theory

Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137384997.0003.

At the end of the nineteenth century, in France two famous predictions were advanced for the twentieth century: the publicist in psychology and politically conservative Gustave Le Bon (1895), traumatised by the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871 and galvanised by General Georges Boulanger’s charismatic leadership, prophesied that the coming century would have been the age of crowds, while the jurist and social theorist Gabriel Tarde (1901), apparently more worried by the Dreyfus affaire and the way in which it split the opinion of a whole nation into two, replied that, instead, the new century would have been the age of publics. Soon after, the American sociological founding figure Robert E. Park (1903) sided himself with Tarde. In a subsequent article Park (1940: 686) added a further item: ‘Ours, it seems, is an age of news’.

Even in retrospect, it is not easy to tell who was right, and which collective formation actually became predominant. For his part, for instance, the Italian positivist scholar Scipio Sighele (1899) proclaimed in a Solomonic way that our age is simultaneously one of publics and of crowds.

Indeed, the first half of the twentieth century was marked by the scourge of totalitarianisms in Europe, the mobilisation of crowds, the perversion and implosion of their desires around the cult of the leader (the fetish-body of the leader), along with the paranoia of ‘vital space’ and the racist abjection which culminated in the extermination programme. Yet, while totalitarian regimes certainly thrived thanks to the ‘taking of the street’, the organisation of large rallies in sport stadia, the endless parades on newly built urban boulevards and so on, they would have not been possible without the power of the mass media and the development of propaganda techniques. In the second half of the century, however, domesticated and ‘democratic’ mass media, as sensitive captors of so-called public opinion, intertwined with the creation and handling of ‘public problems’, played no minor role in shaping Western affluent society and its urban life (incidentally, the 1970s postmodernist current in social theory can be regarded as a by-product of such crucial role played by mediated communication at the societal scale, where the media decide access of subjects and events to social visibility and, above all, many social theorists live safe middle-class lives in front of a TV-set): crowds are urban, publics suburban.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the two old – and by now apparently familiar – collectives, the crowd and the public, with their respective promises and threats – democratic debate and free exchange of opinions on the one hand, unruly action and passionate contagion of beliefs on the other – are once again at the forefront of our preoccupations. This comes in conjunction with the appearance of new mediation infrastructures and new configurations of political action. While the phrase ‘mass personalisation’ used to be an oxymoron in the twentieth century, at a time when the mass was regarded as an inherently de-individualising and de-personalising force, mass personalisation has in fact become not only a reality but a major business in the twenty-first century, thanks to the customisation and gadgetisation of ‘user-empowering’ (such is the mainstream representation in both academic talk and advertisement) information-technology products. Today, mass personalisation goes hand in hand with another seemingly paradoxical yet no less powerful phrase that captures our Zeitgeist, namely ‘networked individualism’. The classical notion of the freestanding individual maintained by the tradition of liberal political thought (John Locke and followers) was inherently grounded in the idea that the individual was a human reality – or, at least, a theoretical entity – that pre-existed the social group it would then join (via social contract). It is the image of the homo clausus Norbert Elias (2000[1969]) criticised in the long and important introduction to the second edition of The Civilizing Process. But today we directly experience the fact that we can become individuals only insofar as, and in the measure in which, we are connected, online, with access to wider territories of information and interaction. This fact opens a new scenery. On the one hand, it is certainly true that so-called personal media provide us with dynamic representations of the ambient world and its relevant information, conveniently put from our own perspective (a relatively trivial experience using Google maps and other similar applications); but, on the other, that very possibility hinges on the fact that our perspective is but a contingent actualisation of a much larger impersonal matrix of data provided to all users (or, more restrictively, to all authorised users). As we are (RSS-) ‘fed’ with information and, in turn, feed back information to others, ‘We, the users’ are thus turned into a complex social material entity and a new collective that – at times, confusingly – exhibit the traits of both a crowd and a public.

The uncanny twin notions of mass personalisation and networked individualism present us with a situation in which technical and moral agency is still imagined as tied to some sort of individual basis – and where, consequently, the individual is conceived of as the major ‘building block’ of the social – but where simultaneously the power of action is recognised as resting in substantial measure on networks, connections and the relative positions generated within those networks: it is only by joining such media spaces that we can hope to connect to others and begin to interact with them. Such mediated social multiplicities might look rather different from classical twentieth-century publics, though. Yes, we are mature publics bearers of opinions; but we are also hyperactive handlers of information who ‘receive it and pass it on’, often creating curious traces shaped like cascades, chain reactions and loops. In online social platforms, crowds seem to reappear, albeit in a new guise – namely as ‘crowdsourcing’ entities. Mass personalisation, network individualism and crowdsourcing deserve attention not simply as contemporary cultural phenomena (the ideology of late late capitalism, the latest ideology of capitalism, the ideology of neo-liberalism just before or well deep into its crisis), but also and especially, I would argue, as phenomena that question our episteme, our capacity to describe, appreciate and understand the formation and transformations of social multiplicities, these nebulosae that, in fact, form the basic human material.

Therefore, the fact that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, questions about the nature of collective social formations, their morphology and their ‘circulations’, are once again amply debated in social theory – just as they were in the late nineteenth century, at the time of Tarde, Durkheim and Simmel: a period Wagner (2001) has described as ‘the first crisis of modernity’ – can be taken as a sign that some major transformations are currently under way (counting with Wagner, a third crisis of modernity, after the second crisis of the 1960s?). The on-going transformation of urban spaces through the spreading of information and communication technologies constituting a permanent infrastructural layer that supports, selects and sorts different types of mobility, coupled with the emergence of new forms of administration and governance of social phenomena at different scales of action, seem to call for new conceptualisations of how displacements, gatherings and assemblies take place and what kind of socio-spatial (better, I submit, territorial) phenomena they are. Indeed, the changing political, economic and cultural importance of social multiplicities entails multiple stakes, which I would like to outline in the following reflection.

In the first place, politically, there is the issue of the new articulation of the two dimensions of the public and the common, which includes the question of how to re-imagine various practices of ‘taking care of’. Formal–rational bureaucratic administration represented the classical modern answer to such a need–want–requirement (which Weber called Bedürfnis). The ways in which we (might) take care of each other through the constitution of new forms of mutuality, as well as the ways in which we (might) take care of the environment and the atmosphere we live in (the oikouméne) are some of our current most urgent Bedürfnisse. Second, economically, there is the issue of the new forms of production, circulation, distribution and valorisation of our assets, which includes, for instance, the configuration of affective economies of attention, in which values are created by certain alignment of visibilities and the focusing – the territorialisation – of scattered attentions upon certain places or items (along with the concurrent processes of invisibilisation of diverging paths and patterns). Third, culturally, there is the issue of how the new forms of sociation are imagined, shaped, discussed and experimented – a process which involves not simply the ‘thrown-togetherness’ of urban life, but also the more subtle and plural paths towards aggregation, and the ways in which the thresholds of togetherness are activated, crossed or postponed.

To make social theory, that is, to venture into the epistemological puzzle of society and sociation, is also necessarily to make cultural histories. In other words, because our epistemological enquiry into the social is an enquiry ‘from within’, one cannot proceed towards it without concurrently considering how, in given social and historical contexts, this same problématique of the social has been posed, discussed and translated into operative knowledge. Consequently, the following exploration does not content itself to be a cultural history of certain key notions, but also aims to intersect the epistemic and political layers. The questions we are facing are pressing and difficult. In its most evident form, there is the question of ‘Who are we?’. Notably, this question is different from the classical question of political philosophy concerning the sources of political power, for such ‘Who are we?’ may in fact also be phrased as ‘What are we?’ – the latter way of putting the matter evoking issues of governmentality and ecology, that is of the gathered materials that compose the heterogeneous ecology of social collections. The ambiguous multiplicities, as they have been scientifically and culturally appraised, are attempts to answer the question ‘Who are we?’. What sorts of social compositions or social configurations do we form together?’

Besides that, I also wish to suggest that the double question of ‘Who’ and ‘What’ we are cannot be fruitfully tackled unless we also connect it to a third one, namely ‘Where are we?’, that is, the question which concerns the spaces and the territories that social multiplicities can make together in order to meet and coexist in a liveable oikouméne. Phenomena like crowds, publics, assemblies, collectives, swarms, rabbles, legions, rallies and gatherings stretch from the most immediate materiality of bodies (bodies as complex and faceted materials), through their spatial, technological and mediating arrangements, to the creation of a world in common and the institution of a polity, via the affective intensifications (nebulae) of interaction in a plurality of encounter situations. Rather than with the classical political question of the formation of a collective will out of a plurality of biologically separated individuals, today we are faced with a question that is socio-technical and bio-political at the same time: essentially, it is the question about the ways in which social multiplicities may territorialise themselves within certain spaces and inside certain material environments, upon certain layers and certain architectures of interaction and affection. I beg the reader’s patience if my social–theoretical exploration might at first look like as ‘merely’ a cultural history. Hopefully, my reasons will become clearer before the end.

2

Urban Crowds, Mediated Publics and Global Masses

Abstract: While crowds were regarded by many nineteenth-century authors as exceptional, unknown creatures attacking civilization from the outside, early twentieth-century sociologists increasingly focused on the more familiar yet, for some reasons, no less uncanny figure of the mass. Whereas the perceived problem with crowds was their aggressiveness, masses were mainly charged with passiveness, shapelessness and anomy. Apparently, publics were more active producers of opinions, yet soon exposure, emotionality and cacophony and were attributed to them.

Keywords: the average man; class conflict; civilisational conflict; crowd policing; crowds 2.0; ‘massification’; mass culture; urbanophobia/urbanophilia

Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137384997.0004.

Since the late eighteenth century, and more clearly during the course of the nineteenth century, the most visible and most characteristic social multiplicity was the crowd – and, more specifically, the urban crowd. While public administrators, planners and the police discursively and practically attempted to configure the city as a pacified space for social interaction, exchange, commerce, production, distribution and consumption, urban space has in fact remarkably remained at the centre of all major social tensions and conflicts of that period. After major historical episodes of urban unrest in Europe – such as 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871 – when cities turned into veritable battlefields, the intensification of ordinary urban rhythms resulting from new socio-technical, organisational and logistic patterns led observers and theorists to increasingly describe the city as the space that materially embodied the ‘shocks’ of modernity. Among such shocks, urban crowds obviously occupied a prominent role. As the best literature on this topic has shown (McClelland 1989, Van Ginneken 1991, Borch 2012), fear of an unruly subject of this type was recurrently expressed both practically and theoretically: crowds were irrational, destructive, criminal, delinquent and so on ... that is, quintessentially uncontrollable. Even before the end of the ancien régime, as reported by Walter Benjamin (1983[1937–39]: 40), secret police agents in Paris described the densely populated inner-city quarters where the popular classes lived as ‘safe havens for criminals’. In similar formulations, the crowd clearly stood as an alias for the subaltern popular classes. While ordinary police forces sought to ‘extract’ single criminals or deviant subjects from the mass (of this enterprise police and judicial photography archives bear moving testimony), the mythical figure of the flâneur, to which Benjamin himself devoted so much hermeneutic energy, literally dove into the crowd, ‘set[ting] up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’, with an ultimate mission of ‘becoming one flesh with the crowd’ (ibid. 9) – a technique which, as reminded by Frisby (2001), was also soon to be learnt by detectives and undercover agents.

The seemingly opposite observational experiences of ‘distancing from’ versus ‘immersing in’ the crowd relate to well-known ideas and prejudices about the crowd itself and its hypnotic–suggestive–contagious effect. Christian Borch (2012) has recently characterised these narratives as constituting a specific ‘crowd semantics’. Interestingly, a number of well-known theories elaborated at that time by anthropologists, criminologists, sociologists, psychiatrists and crowd psychologists still resurface in our contemporary imagination. Late-nineteenth-century master narrative was pivoted around the opposition between the mature freestanding individual – that is, the educated bourgeois heterosexual adult male (the ‘empty sample’, as Deleuze would later call it) – and the irrational (thus essentially ‘feminine’ and ‘infantile’) populace living at a lower degree of individualisation, incapable of controlling itself and its own thrusts, subject to mass suggestion and blind imitation of more or less episodic leaders (meneurs, demagogues etc.). The narrative of psychic epidemics, mass suggestion, blind imitation and mental contagion, allegedly bound to produce riotous mobs, barbarously destructive populace and maddening crowds, can be found reproduced with some variations in authors ranging from to Cesare Lombroso to Scipio Sighele, from Hippolyte Adolphe Taine to Henri Fournial and of course, most (in-)famous of all, Gustave Le Bon – not to mention a Friedrich Nietzsche. In the following generation, scholars as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Ortega y Gasset, Boris Sidis, Edward Alsworth Ross and Everett Dean Martin (on the latter three, in particular, see Leach 1986) would echo similar concerns. The narrative must have been deeply grounded in the Zeitgeist considering that, in the mid-nineteenth century, it also featured in seminal writers of urban life such as Eugène Sue, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, followed, at the turn of the century, by successful novelists like Guy de Maupassant and Bram Stoker. Not much later, in the early twentieth century, artistic circles such as the Italian Futurists could still capitalise on the binomial folla-follia (‘crowd as madness’) for their paintings and happenings (Poggi 2002), while the late Victorian and colonialist author Rudyard Kipling depicted Indian crowds as oriental, exotic and mysterious creatures. Over and over again, modern riotous urban crowds were described as the heirs, or the re-embodiment, of the barbarians who, at the end of the Ancient Age, had destroyed the Roman Empire.

One could summarise by saying that class conflict written large got translated into civilisation conflict. Hence, crowds were regarded through an exotic lens as the eruption of atavistic forces from either the margins of civilisation (e.g. in Southern European regions) or from the urban underbelly (especially in the Parisian depictions by Sue, Zola, Balzac and Hugo). The wretched, the child and the woman – each affected by their specific forms of deviance and pathology – are the figures standing at th...