Modernity is Crowd

"When I feel the masses in my hands, since they believe in me, or when I mingle with them, and they almost crush me, then I feel like one with the masses." These words were spoken in 1932 by the self-appointed "artist" of mass politics in the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini. Words, in fact, followed immediately by a symptomatic disclaimer: "However there is at the same time a little aversion, much as the poet feels towards the material he works with."¹ The fascist "aestheticization of politics"—that is, the study of the phenomenon and the discussion around Walter Benjamin's famous formulation—has contributed in recent years to establishing the figure of the masses as the central nexus of: the crisis of the bourgeois subject (modernization); the experience of an ambiguous, and ambivalent, "modernity"; and the rise of "new" forms of politics, artistic expression, and media (modernism). "Mass-culture," "mass-politics," (means of) "mass-communication," all the way up to the more recent (weapon of) "mass destruction," have entered with prepotency the vocabulary of academics, journalists, and everyday people, thereby reifying their figure of reference, the masses, to the point of creating all but an equation between "modernity" and "masses." Had the purpose of the two editors of Crowds been that of reminding us of the physical presence of the crowd beneath the a(n) estheticizing lure of "the masses," we would already be very grateful to them, as we indeed are when we notice how little space they have allowed in their collection of essays to the classic loci of "mass" discussion such as Mussolini's aesthetic politics, and those of Stalin and Hitler. But, this collective book offers a lot, lot more.

To begin with Crowds is not a mere "collection of essays," because it is comprised of sixteen full-length essays, fifteen semantic histories, and sixteen testimonial essays offered by well-known academics connected in one way or another with the history and theory of modernization, modernism, and modernity. Although these three types of writings are not entirely interdependent or amalgamated, one needs only look at the webpage (crowds.stanford.edu) that hosts the online segment of the Crowds project to realize that several of the authors who have written semantic histories for the book, have also produced essays for the website. A sense of intense interaction and genuine collaboration thus pervades this book, making it a truly collective piece of work rather than a straightforward collection of essays. This does not mean that the book does not have authors. In keeping with the "humanities lab" spirit of their enterprise, the Director of the Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL), Jeffrey T. Schnapp, and—to a lesser extent—its Vice Director, Matthew Tiews, appear to act more like principal investigators on the project, rather than simply being editors of the book. They contribute almost all of the entries on "Crowd Theorists" on the website (crowds. stanford.edu/theorists), and Schnapp also curates, and edits the catalogue for, an exhibition entitled "Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914–1989," which comprises the third leg of the SHL's Crowds project. To properly evaluate this collective enterprise means therefore to look at three interconnected aspects of the book: firstly, as an "experimental hybrid whose contours deliberately overlap those of the project Website and the Revolutionary Tides exhibition" (xii); secondly, as a representative of the "Big Humanities" approach that the SHL was created to undertake (xii); and, thirdly, as an interdisciplinary project designed to address the working hypothesis that after reaching its apogee in the mid-twentieth century "new forms of mass assembly and collective social action" have begun to "attenuate gradually in the second half of the century … as a result of the proliferation and ever-increasing prevalence of media-based forms of assembly" (xii). In other words, as Schnapp writes in the introduction to the volume, the whole project was designed to track continuities and discontinuities among contemporary and "modern" discourses and phenomenal expressions of...