Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

Afterword: On Crowds and Power

195 Born in Bulgaria into a community of Sephardic Jews in 1905, Elias Canetti moved with his family to England when he was about six. His father suddenly died a year later and the family moved to Vienna ; Canetti attended schools there and in Zurich for the next fifteen years or so. To satisfy his mother’s insistence that he learn something of practical value in the world, he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at age twenty-four. He never practiced a scientific profession , however, and upon finishing his doctorate, he became what he would remain the rest of his life, a writer. Within a few years he completed his one novel, Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung), a comic, dreadful , intensely imagined work that is perhaps the least known of the great monuments of modern European literature. He fled the Nazis in 1938, returning to England where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Canetti authored a number of rarely produced plays, several books of aphorisms and meditations, three volumes of his memoirs through about age thirty-one, a short travel book titled The Voices of Marrakech, and a number of essays. He wrote in German, his fourth or fifth language, but the one in which he lived from age eight until he moved permanently to England . All his published writings have been translated, some with his advice, into English. At the center of his oeuvre stands Crowds and Power. To it he devoted thirty-five years, much of that time to the exclusion of other work. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in August 1994. Since its publication in 1960 (English translation, 1962), Crowds and Power has attracted admirers around the world, especially in Europe. In North America, it has been less noticed or discussed . Given the originality and trenchant independence of Canetti’s work, along with the difficulty of classifying it and finding a place for it among dominant structuralist and postmodern social theories, its neglect is not wholly mystifying. On the other hand, the twentieth century is widely acknowledged as a century of crowds and concurrently of appalling abuses of power. Within Afterword: On Crowds and Power AFTERWORD 196 that context, one might have expected more impact from what J. S. McClelland called the “first masterpiece” of crowd theory.1 Richie Robertson, writing on “Canetti as Anthropologist,” observed , “Much of the book anticipates trends in the human sciences that have developed only since its publication.”2 He concluded by hoping that if Canetti missed his moment, his time may nonetheless be yet to come. The publication during the 1990s in Germany of a dozen books on Canetti indicates that his importance has been growing there; and the number of non-German contributors to a 1995 volume of essays on Crowds and Power suggests that the wave of his influence is propagating elsewhere as well.3 A multitude of articles and Web sites in a remarkable number of languages confirm the widening interest in Canetti’s thought. In 2000, David Darby, a Canadian scholar, edited a collection of Critical Essays on Elias Canetti.4 The Italian journal Running New devoted an issue in 2002 to the subject “Elias Canetti, The Anthropology of Evil and Metamorphosis.”5 As of 2005, the centenary of Canetti’s birth, essays, new books, and conferences devoted to his work continue to multiply. The rhetorical form of Crowds and Power, many of its central subjects, and its methods are disorientingly original. Whether Canetti’s great work should be considered anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, psychology, a mix of those, or something else altogether has been less a matter of dispute than puzzlement. “Crowds and Power is a work without a clear position between literature and science.”6 Its argument follows lines neither straight nor circular; it neither progresses by logical steps nor returns regularly to one governing idea. My preference in spatial analogies, for what it may be worth, is for an ellipsoid with foci of crowds, power, and transformation, such that wherever on the curve of Canetti’s exposition one may be, the influence of those three centers of gravity will be felt in various proportions. As to the question of what Crowds and Power may be, the answer seems to me straightforward if somewhat arcane. Formally, Crowds and Power fits comfortably into the casual, encyclopedic literary habit that Northrop Frye identified as the “anatomy.” More commonly encountered in fictional or religious incarnations like...