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Appendix: Summary of Crowds and Power
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213 A few miscellaneous preliminaries: 1. The summary is for the convenience of the reader who has never read Crowds and Power; it may also serve as a quick review for those familiar with Canetti’s work. Obviously a précis that reduces its subject by more than an order of magnitude cannot fully represent , let alone substitute for, Canetti’s dense and eloquent original. 2. The absence of most of the myths, historical incidents, or anthropological summaries that Canetti uses to expound his understanding of such things as transformation is necessary for brevity, but reduces the vitality of Canetti’s thought. A few of those myths are summarized in the sections of this book that analyze particular films. 3. I generally quote Crowds and Power from Carol Stewart’s translation . On occasion, however, when Canetti’s German seems especially vivid or crucial, I provide it, using the 1960 edition (Hamburg : Claasen Verlag). 4. I have placed my comments in parentheses where it may not be clear if remarks are my own rather than Canetti’s. The Crowd: “The Fear of Being Touched” From the first sentence of the first essay of Crowds and Power, Canetti’s attack is direct, concrete, compact: “Nichts fürchtet der Mensch mehr als die Berührung durch Unbekanntes” (“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown”). He offers no prefatory survey of previous crowd theorists, no general remarks about humans as social animals, or their xenophobia, or what it really means to know something or someone. Canetti goes straight to the basis in human nature for the forming of crowds and seeking of power, the description and analysis of which will occupy the next 500 or so pages of his magnum opus. The instinctive terror of being seized by an unknown agent underlies both the communal response of crowd formation and the aggressively indiAppendix : Summary of Crowds and Power APPENDIX 214 vidualistic drive to accumulate power. Coalescing into a crowd counteracts people’s terror of being touched; the lust for power pathologically exaggerates that fear into what Canetti identifies as an obsession with survival—preferably survival alone. In support of his opening assertion Canetti appeals to shared experience: There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown . He wants to see what is reaching toward him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security : it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenseless flesh of the victim. (15) Because of this fear, humans create spaces around themselves, shut themselves in closed houses, take offense if brushed in public by a stranger, and hasten to offer apologies when they accidentally cause the contact. “The whole knot of shifting and sensitive reactions to an alien touch . . . proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious” (15). Although Stewart renders the title of the opening essay of Crowds and Power simply as “The Fear of Being Touched,” Canetti’s original German describes its full subject: “Umschlagen der Berühungsfurcht”—which may be rendered literally as “Reversals or Sudden Changes of Touch-Fear,” a title that stylistic grace can hardly tolerate, but that represents Canetti’s words and the contents of the following discussion more accurately than the economical and idiomatic but misleading title in English. Given that we are talking about the opening premises of Canetti’s argument and that his book will focus on the many transformations undergone by crowds, packs, and the morphologies of power, the disappearance of the Umschlagen from the English title represents a significant omission. (Later in Crowds and Power, Stewart translates “Umschlag der Meuten” as “The Transmutation of Packs.”) Canetti’s title also anticipates his fundamentally dynamic understanding of crowds and power and their various species, permutations , and transmutations. The abrupt reversal of the fear of being touched into its opposite takes place only in a physically and psychically dense crowd. “As soon as a man has surrendered himself to [54.84.65.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:21 GMT) APPENDIX 215 the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch” (15). Indeed, as Canetti later asserts, people crave the crowd more as they experience it more. The Crowd: “The Open and the Closed Crowd...