Crowds (review)

“The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language” (77). Such is the central claim of Elias Canetti’s fascinating and highly idiosyncratic work, Crowds and Power (1960). Canetti attempts to dissect the crowd almost as if it were a physics problem, elaborating his own schema to judge its form, density, and acceleration. Despite the fact that Canetti won the Nobel Prize partially on the strength of this book, his ahistorical approach would probably not withstand rigorous academic scrutiny today. Studies of the crowd published after Canetti’s work such as George Rudé’s The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (1964), Serge Moscovici’s The Age of the Crowd (1981), and Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (1981) by Susanna Barrows, to name a few, offer more historical depth but are scattered across different disciplines (history, sociology, literature) that do not always seem in conversation with each other.

The book Crowds, edited by Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews and the product of five years of collaborative research at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, is entirely new in that it combines the best aspects of both approaches: it retains the creativity and enthusiasm of Canetti’s project without neglecting the historical context that gives a particular crowd its significance. Among the topics addressed by scholars from different disciplines are sports crowds, movie audiences, crowds in visual art, Chinese crowds, crowds of pilgrims, and revolutionary French masses. To compliment these diverse studies of the crowd, shorter pieces that examine the etymological roots of the word in various languages and personal testimonies about crowd experiences are included in the side margins. This design choice, which suggests hypertext or internet page layouts, results in surprising and occasionally humorous juxtapositions. Schapp’s opening essay titled “Mob Porn,” which analyzes the manipulation of crowd images in an Italian fascist magazine from the 1930s, is paired with Michael Hardt’s effusive prose on his experience of Whitman-esque love at World Bank and imf protests in 2001 and 2003. The chapter on “Market Crowds” by Urs Stäheli about how stockbrokers attempt to use crowd psychology to their advantage is playfully linked with Jessica Burstein’s entertaining account of the predatory habits of the avid shopper during the Barney’s New York Warehouse sale.

Crowds does not seem to have an overarching thesis, although one hypothesis is tentatively advanced. In the introduction, Schnapp notes that “the defining collectivities of the new millennium” seem to be based upon electronic communication and the creation of virtual communities rather than upon the heaving masses that appear in nineteenth century literature (xvi). To this end, the book is associated with an impressive multimedia website that elaborates and illustrates the essays it contains, as well as providing new material on the subject. In principle, interested scholars and artists can also join this virtual community by contributing to the existing gallery of images and text.

Ultimately, however, Schapp and Katherine Hayles agree that “physical congregations and electronic gatherings” are not mutually exclusive but rather “participate in a dynamic media ecology” together (377). Crowds is an exemplary work of collaborative scholarship and would be useful not only to those who interested in the history of the representation of crowds, but to anyone who is teaching modernism more generally.