Le Bon, Freud, and Baudrillard
(June 16, 1997 )
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The idea of crowds has been common to all periods of history. As far back as the Republic , Plato showed distaste for the demos as the ignorant mob responsible for the death of his mentor, Socrates. Livy showed frustration that the empire of Rome could have dominated its external enemies and consolidated itself sooner if not held up by the inner conflicts caused by the Tribunals of the People. George Rudé argued that, during the Middle Ages, there was a “pre-industrial” crowd characterised by peasant revolts that challenged feudal and ecclesiastical authority. However, it is easy to forget that the “industrial,” or modern, crowd had characteristics which differed from these earlier crowds, and that crowd theory had considerable coherence in the writings of Taine, Sighele, Fournial, Le Bon and Tarde prior to the consolidation of anthropology and sociology. To signal some of the shifts in notions of the crowd significant for contemporary theory, I will focus on Le Bon's theory of a “group mind,” Freud's theories of the unconscious, and Jean Baudrillard's notion of the “mass.”
To understand Le Bon's theory, we need to remembner that, prior to the French Revolution, crowds were often seen in terms of revolts, lynch mobs, groups at public executions, crusades and mobs outraged at industrial inequities. A “crowd” could become a “mob” if the conditions were right, but the mob was a sporadic phenomenon and just one of many potential threats against the order of society. For McLelland, “[t]he people were allowed to be a mob, but only within strict limits; the circus mob could do almost what it liked in the stadiums, provided it went home afterwards. This required special policing, but not much else, certainly not a new way of looking at society ” (McLelland 5, my italics). However, around the mid-18 th century, after the Revolution, the crowd stopped being seen as a sporadic phenomenon and became a political force that changed the way people looked at society. The crowd - the people, canaille , mob, or mass - were no longer to be snubbed at by elites who claimed to hold political right as protectors of the traditions and values of culture. The crowd became entrenched in the political field, with a political voice of its own: the “people” were declaring new rights and the mob was a source of political power and a means of legitimating that power. Consequently, any act of mob violence could be seen as a manifestation of an ongoing revolutionary process which sought to transform the foundation of social order, not merely disrupt it.
Taine, reacting against this, challenged the rights of the republic, which he considered founded on the false notion that man was naturally good, or at least had a sense of duty in respecting the rights of others. For Taine, notions of liberty, equality and fraternity and democracy merely masked the barbarity characteristic crowds, and certainly during the Terror of the French Revolution, that is, after the passing of the Law of Suspects in September 1793, thousands were guillotined, drowned or shot on the mere suspicion of being traitors to the new republic. If history had taught Taine anything, it was that progress did not lay in the natural rights in man or the mob consciousness of the revolutionary crowd. Men needed the discipline characteristic of science from the State, Law, education or they would be “murdering in the street” (10). The discipline of science (used by “us,” with “our” intellectual and moral heritage) was thus needed to keep the “mob” (“them,” with their irrational, spontaneous violence) from forcing us on “a journey back to primal barbarism down the progressive path that mankind had beaten so laboriously through the ages” (10). So theorists still argued that the crowd's claims to the arena of politics were founded on false premises, and that the crowd merely disrupted, rather than transformed, Progress.
Science, in Taine's sense of the word, of course privileged individuals and the rationality of individuals. The positivist notion of objectivity, after Locke, implied that all the uncertainties and irrational terrors of the individual's mind had been removed, and Truth was what could be seen. We knew ourselves, and could begin to understand the world, and since a world understood could be improved, nature was no longer hostile. Instead of inheriting our social forms from chance (as had our “primitive” ancestors), rational individuals were part of a project to improve the world. Man would choose his own laws in Kant's sense of “maturity” coming through Man's duty to use his Reason. “This was the great liberal reforming programme of the nineteenth century . . . [A]ll public institutions . . . were to be run on lines that someone, or some body of men, had worked out for themselves” (13). Idealists similarly posited Progress along the lines that laws were willed into being, but, unlike the Liberals, they argued that law did not exist in society, but in minds. Progress was conceived in terms of the World-as-mind; the social presented itself as mind to the individual mind, with individuals part of a collectively developing rationality.
Le Bon was interested in the mentality of the crowd, and he agreed with Taine that the crowd's mentality was simplistic and operated through childish images (which could be manipulated, as they had been centuries ago when Menius Agrippa told the “plebs” a fairy story to convince them to “return to their allegiance” (4). However, he posited the Law of the Mental Unity of Crowds, which stated that crowds had a “group mind” that was unconscious , and so did not follow the same laws as individual minds, and while certain people were predisposed to it, otherwise intelligent individuals were also susceptible. Indeed, Le Bon argued that the group mind was not merely limited to those in crowds, social proximity was enough to make individuals subject to it. This suggested not only that any group could become a crowd (even those in respected spheres of order, such as juries, armies, governments), but a whole society might be a crowd. Consequently, those who once considered themselves the rational “we” who defended culture and Progress from the regressive crowd were part of the danger to social order. That is, the agents of the rational and conscious project of positivist science were as susceptible to irrational and unconscious thoughts which they formerly attributed solely to the mob. This undermined the Liberal project because an unconscious mind might be manipulating our conscious minds in ways we could not predict, and what we see may only be distortions or illusions. This meant we could no longer be seen as rationally choosing our laws. This also undermined Idealism, for it had often been asked, where was the World-mind? Le Bon's group mind was a credible possibility, but it was un conscious and ir rational. So Hegel's hope that the dialectic of history progressed by a broadening of the range of individuals involved in rational decision making was inverted; the more individuals that participated in the “group mind,” the more irrationality entered the social. So, in the wake of Le Bon, Idealism had to consider mind limited to individuals, or posit a new mind, which McLelland argues, it failed to do.
Le Bon's theory also refuted the claims of Social Darwinism. There were many applications of Darwinism which could be identified under the heading of Social Darwinism, but I will foreground the way the notion of “a struggle of existence” and “survival of the fittest” legitimated an individualistic, competitive society, and a laissez faire form of politics which held that the state should not interfere with the “natural” competition of individuals. Of course, Social Darwinism was a problematic field to begin with: it used Darwin 's notion of biological evolution and applied it to social evolution without clarifying the line between the biological and the social, when Darwin himself asserted that forces other than natural selection effected social evolution. Darwin thought that “the noble qualities come first, even if the beast is still within the man” (Darwin, quoted in Love 43), and social instincts, such as love and sympathy, led to social bonds, and bonds and cooperation were more important to social evolution than conflict. The presence of a Liberal or Idealist Mind influencing or planning the Progress of mankind was conspicuously opposed to the random nature of evolution characterised by natural selection; and where Darwin identified man as influencing evolution, it was through his instincts , not his mind, and through cooperation , not conflict. The triumph of Darwin over Lamarck also led to the understanding that social forms of behaviour were not passed on from generation to generation; only biological forms of behaviour were genetically inherited. The whole of social progress was thus effaced with every birth and had to be reasserted through Law and education. This meant Man himself was not inherently evolving; evolution in any progressive sense depended upon the institutions in which individuals evolved, and man was no higher up the evolutionary ladder than the “primitives” he once condescended to. Men could be seen as primitives with a “gloss of civilization . . . [just as] Westernized blacks [were seen as] savages in white men's clothing” (20).
Read in Le Bon's terms, the crowd bound together for protection and survival, but the price of this adaptation was a lowering of consciousness. Le Bon had said that the modern age was the Era of Crowds, and while the implication was that crowds were more common and social decisions were made by larger groups, he was suggesting that “modern men were just as unthinking as they had been in the past” (McLelland 14). Theorists like Scipio Sighele here argued that if the crowd should be identified as belonging anywhere, it was at the primal moment of evolution when all was undifferentiated matter. Indeed, since the transmittance of social values was always haunted by “other pasts which still spoke directly to men in crowds, an animal past beyond barbarism, and perhaps even a vegetable past beyond that” (22), it was perhaps rational to surrender to this tremendous, enveloping force.
Despite his pessimistic consequences of his theory, Le Bon sided with Enlightenment values by arguing that there were possibilities of new technologies for controlling crowds, so we need not surrender to them. Constabulary, administration, city planning and sociological statistics, and the “physiognomies” published in Victorian England and France (which offered typologies that enabled individuals to recognise groups of people by sight) were certainly such technologies. But crowd psychology held a particular interest for crowd theorists. This interest was related to the anxiety that if modernity was the Era of Crowds, or the age of the masses, then a new kind of politics might be necessary. Given the waning of individualism as a viable social theory - that is, the sense that the “everyman” had been lost in the mass - it was hoped this form of politics involved the leader as an individual, as a vestige of consciousness in the unconsciousness of the crowd. The hope was, “if the crowd could be led from the inside, by leaders of its own, it could also be led on the outside by leaders thrust upon it” (McLelland 237). However, after World War I, when democracy was imposed on Germany , the notion that democracies (the epitome of optimism regarding the crowd as a social form) could all look nostalgically back upon a heritage of revolutionary freedom had ended (27). The anxiety about how (or if) the rule of leaders was to be decided and legitimated 1 depended , to some extent, upon an understanding of the relationship of crowds to their leader, and so on the conclusions of crowd psychology. Did leaders truly command crowds, or did the crowd and its leader simultaneously “regress”? Did the leader merely speak the crowd's discontent, or did leaders exploit the discontent of crowds, masking his or her real intentions with rhetoric? The last case can be considered the dominant view, given the serious and protracted concern with hypnotism (in the sense that leaders “hypnotised” crowds). How did the hypnotist create a willing, submissive subject, and how might a leader create a similarly willing and submissive crowd? Despite Le Bon's pretensions to be using the most recent claims of depth psychology, hypnotism had not been explained, and it is here that Freud took up the problem in his article “Group Psychology” (1921).
Freud's theory foregrounds the relationship between psychology and the social. For Freud, the psychology of individuals developed in relationship to the family, class and so on. Liberals and Idealists, though they recognised the individual lived in the social, stated their arguments in ways that seemed to indicate this was not so, necessitating a logical leap from a concrete individual mind to an abstract group mind (or the World-as-mind). Freud made the link between the two by arguing that although psyches were individual and unique, the fact that people lived in common social forms, especially the bourgeois family, meant that individuals shared common psychological features. Psychoanalytic theory was, in a sense, social theory, for it showed that psychology was predicated on social relations, and vice versa. From this perspective, Le Bon's “group mind” was misleading. The unconscious does not exist abstractly, but in individuals who have developed in similar social contexts; and, of course, Freud's dynamic unconscious was not the same as Le Bon's “unconscious.” After Freud, the unconscious was not a mysterious and unknowable entity. Freud argued that the unconscious was merely “that which was repressed,” and since he claimed to know how to decipher the slippery language of the unconscious and determine what it was that was repressed in individuals, the unconscious became just another predictable object of science.
Although “Group Psychology” was published before Freud's official use of the terms Ego and Super-ego, the concepts are present in the text under the different names ego and ego-ideal, and I will use the more familiar terms. For Freud, the individual is born without a sense of self, or Ego, and driven by the “pleasure principle” (libido, or Eros), which recognises no boundaries in seeking satisfaction. During psychosexual development, however, the libido is subject to the “reality principle,” and becomes territorialised when we are forced to give up certain pleasures. The Ego is the practical censor which comes into being as a consequence of the reality principle, repressing desires inconsistent with the stage of psychosexual development we have reached in a social environment. The Unconscious thus consists of those primal desires which we must repress if we are to live with other individuals in society. For Freud, there is another component, the Super-ego, which is to the Ego what the Ego is to the Unconscious - a repressive critic. Its formation is signalled by the internalisation of an ideal self which the Ego strives to imitate but cannot. In moments of stress our repressed desires can resurface, and the Super-ego usually sees to it that these desires only manifest themselves in an unfamiliar form, for example hysteria or obsessive behaviour, which the conscious mind cannot easily associate with incest or the “real” source of the desire. Nonetheless, when these manifestations - or our conscious desires - are contrary to expectations of an internalised ideal self, we feel guilt, and the Super-ego chastises the rest of the Ego.
Freud applied these psychological theories to society the same way Social Darwinists applied Darwin 's biological metaphors to society; but while he acknowledged the limits of such analogies, he occasionally spoke in a way which asserted his conclusions were literal. Now while crowd theorists often distinguished between an individual's love for a leader, and his or her love for other members of the crowd, they concluded that these were both manifestations of a single kind of love, and so were accumulative. But Freud thought that there was a distinction between the two and that this was important to an understanding of how leaders controlled crowds. Freud argued that the love for a leader could be described in terms of the identification with the leader in the Super-ego, and love for fellow members in the crowd could be described in terms of a (consequent) identification with other crowd members in the Ego. Freud related this to the first and formative prohibition of desire in the psychological development of individuals. For Freud, the young male child desires his mother more than his father because of the biological intimacy of pregnancy and breastfeeding.
The father's sexual possession of the mother makes him and the boy-child deadly rivals for the mother in a struggle which the father must win; the son is forced to renounce the possibility of possessing his mother and to accept his father's prohibition against incest. The son also loves his father as well as hating him (ambivalence), and he feels guilt for his murderous hatred for his father at the same time as he is forced to accept the ban on incest. This internalized feeling of guilt associates itself with the prohibition on incest as a conscience which represses the son's incestuous drives by denying incestuous wishes access to consciousness. (A parallel development takes place in girls. Because the mother is less fierce in her prohibitions than her father, the Oedipus Complex, and therefore the censoring conscience, is less strong in girls than in boys.) (McLelland 245)
Similarly, for Freud, a member of the crowd saw that the object of his or her desire, that is the leader, was unattainable; this desire led to the leader being internalised in the Super-ego as an ideal-self. The analogue for Freud is selfless love, whereby another person, the leader, becomes “I,” “the highest and purest part of himself” (250). In a Christian sense, we identify the leader, God, as a father substitute, and fellow crowd members, fellow disciples of God, as equally loved subjects of the leader, or “brothers.” We recognise that others in the crowd are in the same situation of not being able to have the leader directly, and internalise the crowd in our Ego as an acceptable expression of desire. The excess libido from our love of the leader is “distributed” among the rest of the crowd.
Freud's “crowd,” then, is the compensation for the physical absence of the leader signalled by the mental presence of the leader in the Super-ego and is held together by libido, or Eros 1 ; and having internalised the leader as a Super-ego, members of the crowd are susceptible to a leaders general commands in the same way an individual under hypnosis is susceptible to commands. But what was being identified as a hypnotic relationship was in fact a consequence of a particular group formation between two or more individuals in a crowd, and the effectiveness of a leader's commands was not based upon the nature of the specific commands, but on the strength of the Super-ego the leader replaced 2 . Given that the Super-ego was distant from the Ego and the individual was so highly prized, the solution that solved the dual problem of controlling crowds and dealing with the loss of individuals in “mass” society was obvious: encourage good leaders who were separate from the crowd (for example parliamentary representatives who had come far from the “mob”), and whose values were toned down, conservative, or in line with the State's. We might say here that while Freud expunged the mind of its mysteries, as Locke did, and so implied that order could be imposed on the world, the constant threat of the Unconscious as a force meant that rationality was a less stable enterprise. Consequently, after World War I and the rise of fascism, the idea of good leader as the solution to the problem of the “masses” was given a negative connotation, and the popularity of leaders like Churchill was not enough to prevent this; also, World War II showed that the threat of the Unconscious was not going to be simply controlled by a leader. If the Nazi regime taught us anything, it was that a leader was, at best, a double-edged solution, at worst, not a solution at all 3 .
There is a great theoretical gap between Freud's “crowd” and Baudrillard's “mass.” However, Baudrillard's theories, which developed from a critique of Marxist notions of representation and production, can be related to Freud's because psychoanalysis functioned as a kind of social theory and included assumptions about representation (in the hermeneutics of depth psychology) and production (privileging the bourgeois class, with production a sublimation of the anxiety males felt about female reproduction). Baudrillard's arguments about representation and class differ from Freud's in a way I shall consider in terms of a shift between modernity and postmodernity. For Baudrillard, modernity involved
‘the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and history' . . . Modernity is now characterized as the era of Marx and Freud, the era in which politics, culture, and social life were interpreted as epiphenomena of the economy, or everything was interpreted in terms of desire or the unconscious. These ‘hermeneutics of suspicion' employed depth models to demystify reality, to reveal the underlying realities behind appearances, the forces tha constituted the facts. (Best and Kellner 126)
In short, the sign once masked and distorted a basic reality, whereas now, for Baudrillard, the sign masks the absence of a basic reality, and/or “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Simulations, 10) 4 . This conclusion is directly related to production because, in multi-national capitalism, abstract qualities, like love, goodness and knowledge (which were previously though to be immune from buying and selling) have entered the realm of exchange. This means the Marxist division between the social and the cultural has collapsed; everything in culture can be utilised by social forms of production and become subject to the laws of the market; and since the market is driven by exchange value, the economy now refers to its own signifying system - the abstract, differential system of meaning derived from culture, or what Baudrillard calls the single, homogeneous “Code.” Postmodernity is thus characterised by a loss of the referent in which there is no underlying meaning, no stable foundation beneath the surfaces, no depth . “[E]verything is ‘obscene', visible, explicit” (127), and Freud's tripartite psyche is merely an illusion, a play with mirrors that signifies depth that does not really exist.
If there is no depth, and consequently no division between conscious and unconscious, what characterises Baudrillard's “mass”? For Baudrillard, since signs no longer refer to the real world, we cannot relate one event to another in time except by referring to the Code, and there is a “floating causality,” a sense that causes and effects have disappeared. But if we cannot link cause and effect, how can we link power to a crowd? How can a crowd know that acting in this way will have this effect? Perhaps acting in this way will produce counterproductive effects? Worse, how can we define what causes crowds, or define the moment when a crowd is separated from the rest of the social? Though the “crowd” or “mob” was always an ideological construct, Baudrillard's “mass” is a hyper -ideological construct (more ideological than ideology), because the identity of the “mass” is hostage to the idea of the social. Postmodernity has lost touch with the immediacy of reality and finds it mediated, or endlessly deferred by the Code, and if “[i]t is always a question of proving truth by scandal, proving the law by transgression, proving work by the strike, proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution” ( Simulations 36), then the social proves itself by the “mass.” The social needs a “mass,” just as a city needs a population, and in a situation where the social has been replaced by representations, or simulacra, of the social, these simulacra are more ruthlessly propagated as the social to prove the existence of a social. Without it, the ideological coherence of multi-national capitalism would collapse.
In practical terms, Baudrillard's “mass” is an operator of the concept that late capitalism, and the related institutions of the West, value abstract qualities such as ‘power' and ‘capital' over the experience of individual subjects. We, as individual psychological beings and as a crowd, recognise that the institution of capitalism has relative autonomy and we are objects in the process of it reproducing itself. Of course, capitalism does not so much exploit particular psychological desires, it manufactures our desires. Through socialisation, are desires are constructed by our entry into the all-powerful Code. So our “lack” is controlled by positing new differences in the Code as the basis for exchange: what new market, what consumer group, what “mass” will be the object of our next exchange? The “mass” is, then, both an inclusive and exclusive term that has been labelled and packaged for us; it signifies the way that collectivities are taken out of our hands, and imposed on us. The “mass” is consequently “bored and resentful of [the] constant bombardment with messages and the constant attempts to solicit them to buy, consume, work, vote, register and opinion, or participate in social life” (Best and Kellner 121) and has become an apathetic, silent majority. Information is neutralised, and the “mass”
function[s] as a gigantic black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which hall dimensions curve back on themselves and ‘involve' to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment ( Silent Majorities 9).
In short, Baudrillard's “mass” is stripped of revolutionary possibilities. It is subject to external control, and any “mob” activity is appropriated and exploited, or “sold” in the system, because a symbol of protestation can become a part of advertising. The phrase “it is cool to rebel” no longer has a threatening connotation; we are more likely to associate it to a “cool” drink like XLR8, or someone who is a “rebel” and buys motorbikes, black jackets and cut-up jeans (and so makes motorbikes, black jackets and stone washed jeans “cool,” that is, more popular commodities).
Baudrillard's argument is apt in many ways, but there are problems with his use of the term “mass.” While the concept can be exclusive or inclusive (we can have a Global “mass,” a French “mass,” or a black lesbian “mass,” if the opposition is productive in an ideological or monetary sense), Baudrillard generally extrapolates the “mass” to all of us. This renders the “mass” invisible (or obscenely visible), and renders the term fairly useless. It is better to say that, for Baudrillard, multi-national capitalism is the “mass,” because the “black hole” he ascribes to the “mass” is only one of a larger series of “implosions” with which Baudrillard characterises the effects of multinational capitalism. That is, capitalism is a “black whole” in its entirety; being fundamentally expansionist, it absorbs all resources for abstract goals, giving nothing back to the world, at least nothing that is not recuperated and exploited in the last instance. As a consequence, the “mass” is similar to Le Bon's “group mind.” The “mass” can effect the social as a whole; individuals are effected by the Code without realising it (so it is an unconscious influence); and we act irrationally by privileging exchange value over use value (for example, by buying a brand label item when another, cheaper item may be better). The only major difference is that whereas for Le Bon the coherence of a crowd arises from inside the crowd, for Baudrillard it is imposed from outside . In terms of crowd psychology, the system of multi-national capitalism is the leader that crowd theorists were searching for; and if capitalism is the utopia of Liberals and Idealists, then the “leader” they were looking, the “ego-ideal” they wanted the masses to internalise, was to be found amongst themselves after all.
Unfortunately, like Le Bon's “group mind,” Baudrillard's notion of the “mass” is too abstract, and does not recognise the complex social determinants which provide contrary evidence to his theory. Since Baudrillard posits historical stages of capitalism (market, national and multi-national), with the “mass” in the present, it can be argued that he places the various other meanings of “crowd,” “mob,” “the people” and so on, in the past. But institutions such as youth clubs, neighbourhood watch, charity groups, and lobby and protest groups help people cope with the alienation characteristic of capitalism - that is, they continue to assert the validity of the experience of individuals in the face of anomie. Also, the tendency to emphasise non-public personal relationships, and normalise friends and family as the locus of individuality, is part of the recognition that the bourgeois family and the related ideological institutions of Liberalism are still major institutions in contemporary societies; which means Freud's theories still have descriptive value 6 . Baudrillard's “mass” implies that we can no longer talk of individual crowds, mobs and people, but such groups can be productively identified in union protests, groups of social reform, and riots. These groups may not transform society, but we can talk of crowds not only in terms of revolutionary capability, we in terms of protest and the assertion of identity. In a sense, all identity is protest, for identities are formed out of oppositions. We identify ourselves with this , not that , we oppose ourselves to others because they are different in this way (politically or otherwise). George Rudé argues in Protest and Punishment , that
[p]rotest . . . is a . . . collective act though it may not always be carried out in the company of others. Such acts are fairly easy to recognize in the case of trade-union militants, machine-breakers, food-rioters, demolishes of turn pikes, fences or work-houses, administers or receivers of unlawful oaths, treasonable ort seditious persons, armed rebels and city rioters - all those, in fact, who generally protest within the context of a “popular movement” (quoted in The Face of the Crowd 16)
Protest consolidates a crowd's identity, and even if a crowd cannot change anything, it is important that it retains its oppositional coherence and the optimism that, at some time, its protest will have some positive effects. Of course it cannot be forgotten that in some areas of the world (for example parts of Africa and Indonesia ), revolutions by a “crowd” can effect an individual's relationship to the social. That is, politics and the various meanings and forms of the crowd are not over and done with in the world as a whole 7 . It is not productive, or even logical, to assert that people no longer have identities, or should not assert them, even if we argue that our identities are constructed, or effected, by social forces. Baudrillard only supports his pessimistic view by viewing capitalism as a completely homogenising product (and considering that there has been a stable shift from modern to post-modern societies, rather than acknowledging the continuities which cross pre-modern, modern and post-modern societies). Capitalism consists of fissured, fragmented and multiple processes, and while the globalisation of capital does have homogenising effects and helps to produce a situation in which it seems that there is no longer any real power, contemporary cultural theory shows that political power is still active if the contradictions are carefully and patiently navigated.
The “mass” is, then, a theoretical label that makes sense only in relation to Baudrillard's theory, and is usually addressed to other theorists; a term like “the people,” on the other hand, is a term which speaks to people as a political group. This shift in agency is of major importance. Theory is important to a crowd's collectivity; it is the means by which a crowd can intelligently articulate its protest asides from inarticulate violence, and the means by which it can defend itself from those who would seek to misrepresent it. Even if we refute Freud's theory about the role of a leader, theory (and not merely academic theory) functions in a Gramscian sense as a kind of a leader, organising a group so that it can protest and assert its identity. But the “mass” in Baudrillard's writing does not really organise an active, oppositional political collective in this way. It has the status of a fetish; it is invested with qualities it does not otherwise possess 8 . Fetishism can of course be theorised in Freudian terms of male fear of castration (or penis-envy and the inadequacy in the face of a quantifiable “manliness”); it can also be theorised in Marxist terms as the experience of a commodity abstracted from production. But a fetish can simply be a compensation for some sense of loss, something to replace a lost pleasure, and commodities are a fetish in this sense because, by conferring wealth and power to its owners, they provide a substitute for the loss of pleasure elsewhere (even if this pleasure is the retrospective awareness that then I did not have that commodity, and now I do). The idea of the “mass” is a specific commodity-as-fetish because it stands in for the “crowd” which revolutionaries once used to legitimate their actions but which has proved so ineffectual against the forces of capitalism. The idea of the lack of political power communicated by the “mass” now merely confers power to the those who use the term. Likewise, any theorist who considers Baudrillard his or her “guru” - as the “‘talisman' of the new postmodern universe, as the commotion who theoretically energizes the postmodern scene, as the supertheorist of a new postmodernity” (Best and Kellner 111) - is really positing him as a kind of leader. Baudrillard passes on the idea of the “mass” and himself as a fetish, a cynical compensation for the “loss” of the mob; and those who concern themselves with him become a new “crowd.” That is, in terms of the position of the Academy and the popular, “we” are the enlightened individuals who realise that we don't have any political power, and “you” are the philistines against whom we protest because “you” do not have political power and do not even know it. In short, the practice of reading Baudrillard's idea of the “mass” recuperates the condescending notion of the crowd as “them” that gained so much significance during the Enlightenment. But the fetish of the “mass,” and the consequent valorisation of “us” as a select (self-conscious) part of the (otherwise unconscious) “mass” is merely compensation for our feelings that we have no political power, and those who still believe power still exists do not need this compensation.
It can be argued, then, that Baudrillard's objectification of the “mass” as an apathetic, submissive body operates in the tradition of - and perhaps completes or drives to its extreme - the project of crowd theorists like Taine inaugurated during the Enlightenment. This conclusion stands in the face of the fact that politics is not as redundant as Baudrillard implies, and protest is not only viable, but essential to the identity of groups and the formation of oppositional or revolutionary groups. From this perspective, we need to guard against the casual interchange of words like “crowd,” “mob,” “the people” and “mass,” given the negative connotations of irrationality, poor organisation, and the lack of legitimate rights. Such use maintains the Enlightenment view of the crowd as needing to be controlled or repressed for Progress to continue. Contemporary cultural theory is more closely aligned with the counter-Enlightenment notion of the crowd as a source of revolutionary energy, whose primitive surges and primal energies are necessary for a healthy unconscious to come into existence. Men such as Rousseau, Vico, the Romantics and Nietzsche were attracted to this impulse, criticising the way modern society repressed the vital energies of humanity and so hindered Progress. Of course Freud's conclusions reconciled the conservative Enlightenment view of Progress (the crowd as “modern”) and the revolutionary view of the crowd as a source of primal, revolutionary energy (the crowd as “primitive”), and his theories were used by both the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment impulses of crowd theory. That is, contemporary cultural studies does not consider the notion of a crowd as inherently positive. Rather, it foregrounds that fact that careless use of terms that address the “crowd” can reduce tolerance for groups who may be struggling to claim some coherent identity - and such identities are precious in a system which exploits, takes away, or imposes identities. It is easy to forget that there is no single, abstract crowd, and even if groups in the past claimed to speak as “the people,” or continue to do so today, what we should be listening for are the voices of individual crowds.
Notes
1. Freud, in “Totem and Taboo,” offers a more concrete example through his myth of “primal horde.” In brief, Freud's primal tale begins with a tribe in which a father is monopolising all the women; the sons, all desiring to replace the father, kill him. However, when all the sons have access to the women, they begin fighting one another for possession - all had merely wanted to replace that father, and did not kill him out of a sense of “justice.” Finally, so that they can live together again, they renounce the claims to have sex with women of the horde, and become exogamous. Then they begin to realise that while they had hated the father, they had loved him also, and feel guilt for having killed him. To deal with this guilt, they displace their love for the absent father onto a totem animal, which it is taboo to kill, and deal with the residual resentment they still feel by killing the totem animal in an annual feast. This myth is a kind of primal Oedipal Complex, and Freud - inheriting the Victorian conception of ontogeny repeats phylogeny - argued that the psychological group is not only a regression to the Oedipal structure of relationships (the leader as father, fellow crowd member's as brothers), but a repetition of the primal horde. It is useful to read this myth in terms of Hobbes' theory in Leviathan . What is interesting is that Freud's social contract comes into being after the original Sovereign (the father of the horde) has been deposed and a shift to individualism (the fraternal war) has been seen as impractical, and led to a reinstatement of the father's law (the incest taboo and the sense of unity as co-existent, because they recognise themselves as a psychological crowd subject to the leader, the father, in their Super-egos). That is, Freud does not posit individualism as a fundamental, instead, “group psychology is the given, and it is individuality which needs to be explained” (McLelland, 260).
2. The leader has the dual problem of appealing inclusively to the crowd's Id, Ego and Super-ego. The leader must offer a solution which satisfies the crowd's Unconscious desires (though of course a crowd, which is a consequence of following the leader, may provide enough satisfaction in itself). The leader must also offer a realistic command which is acceptable in terms of the individual's sense of reality (though this sense of reality can be altered by a leader with effective rhetorical strategies, or in times of historical crisis when senses of right and wrong are under question). Finally, the leader as Super-ego must be stronger than the Super-ego(s) it is replacing or superimposed upon, or at least congruent with prior Super-egos.
3. It is interesting to note that Freud himself was part of the Enlightenment impulse, even though his theory opposed theories about individualism that had been exploited during the Enlightenment. McLelland argues that Freud was a Liberal and “[i]t is a measure of [his] political pessimism that he has nothing good to say about any collectivity” (267). Freud, while he privileged some aspects of the lower classes, simultaneously considered that the mind “is to be compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for destruction, has to be held down by a prudent superior class” (SE, 22, p21). In short, he took capitalism as an assumption, and normalised the bourgeois.
4. Especially when the Nazi's began to offer a kind of crowd control much more effective than that of the republic's - a crowd which, as an “unofficial army,” was growing in force. In a sense, the attempt to find a means to control crowds can be viewed as an analogue to the kind of competition evident in the “arms” or the “space” race.
5. Baudrillard in fact posits four stages: first, the sign reflected a basic reality; second, the sign masked and distorted a basic reality; third, the sign masked the absence of a basic reality; and fourth, the sign “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (quoted in Conner, 55). Modernity is characterised by the second stage, and postmodernity by the third and fourth stage (many theorists argue that it is not entirely clear if there is much, or any, difference between the third and fourth stages).
6. Though his exclusion of the female subject and some of the assumptions of depth psychology need to be readdressed, as they are by feminist theorists like Judith Butler.
7. It is useful here to consider Hobbes' notion of a shift from a “state of Nature” to a “commonwealth.” The former is a condition of continual war between possessive, unregulated individuals, who live in continual fear and danger of violent death by each other's hands; the latter comes into existence when individuals give up some of their individual rights to a “sovereign” to gain mutual security, liberty and freedom to live without fear. The sovereign thus monopolises murder by denying individuals the right to murder each other, while retaining the personal right to execute those who commit murder. Of course, in contemporary terms, Hobbes' sovereign has been superseded by complex networks of (inter-)state legislation, and the way we conceptualise the State in terms of space is significant. Hobbes' “commonwealth” is not a spatial term - it is, in a sense, an abstraction, a promise between individuals - but the “State” is the “space” with which a commonwealth identifies itself. Of course, some city forms predate the State, and a State generally requires a city to legitimate the power of that State (in a military, mercantile, or political sense). A “commonwealth,” consequently, might identify its State as extending to the gates of its city or one hundred miles beyond the gates of its city. Individuals, having sworn the contract to each other, may even carry their “commonwealth” outside this State. But, if they break this contract, they may reject the rightness of their being punished for this “crime” because they are beyond the spatial jurisdiction of the State. The city is to the State what the sovereign once was to the commonwealth - that is, the city is metonymic of, or continuous with, the State as the site of a “commonwealth,” and the principal site where a commonwealth's identity is articulated and the social contract most intense. It is, finally, the site from which State power emanates as a hegemonic force.
With the advent of notions of postmodernity, and theorists like Baudrillard, the notion of a social contract becomes problematic. For a theorist like Baudrillard, individuals adhere to the laws of the commonwealth (or the Code) they are born into out of fear, or terror, that they would lose some degree of security, liberty or freedom if they did not; and, also Baudrillard would argue that the commonwealth, the social, the city and the State are all simulations whose effects are global. That is, the fact that, as individuals, we are hostage to a social contract is something effaced by modern notions of the social, and no matter where we go, we are still bound by that contract.
8. In a Marxist sense, fetishism involves attributing “mystical” powers to an inanimate object, a disavowal of human labour resulting in a displacement of value from people who produce commodities to the actual products themselves. That is, social relations of production (the experience of commodities) mask or hide the information embedded in goods about the process of production (human labour). In a Freudian sense, the fetish is symbolic of the penis that an individual with castration anxiety may lose, or a reminder of the last impression made before the child's discovery of the “missing penis”; it is an object of desire, leading to sexual satisfaction.
Baudrillard disavows Marxist and Freudian theory on the basis that there is no underlying reality, but Baudrillard argues that he is talking about the social “as it really is” at the same time he argues the social is discredited, and in doing so, mimes the process he is describing and invalidates his own conclusions. His “mass” is not a representation of the social - because the social reality does not exist - his mass, the characterisation of the social is the social. That is, the loss of the referent means the confusion of reality and the imaginary. But Baudrillard totalises here as does Freud elsewhere, and aspects of both theorists are useful, in a pragmatic sense, in describing the social. In any case, I am only interested in the idea of the fetish in the general sense, that is, as a compensatory object, a displacement of anxiety about the lack of something else (pleasure).
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