JM, Tilme of Guadalupe, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 6.5.08
etween lunch downtown and dancers pouring salt on the stage at REDCAT Thursday, I went to Reference on Lower Level III at the Central Library and explored
Crowds and Power (better in German:
Macht und Masse) for a few hours.
g As I said below, I wanted to read
Crowds and Power this summer, but my summer plans have gang aft agly by my old friend Doug, who gave me a copy of
French Theory at the BEA; and as I said more recently below...
g "French Theory is a very important book." But so, obviously, is
Crowds and Power, though not so much read anymore. French theory got to be French theory by means of Foucault and Deleuze (Foucault wrote the intro to
Anti-Oedipus, by the way). But on reading about a quarter of
Crowds and Power, I think both Foucault and Deleuze wrote in such a way that interacted enormously with Canetti, yet without making it fully obvious to their own readers.
g So, then, deconstructing the original decons: they kept their indices a little too spare of Elias Canetti. They were bold enough to be revolutionaries but not quite so bold as to acknowledge a considerable influence.
g Nobody who reads this blog really reads French theory, or
Anti-Oedipus, or anything at all like that, and I don't blame them, but they do remain curious. Nonetheless, it wouldn't hurt you to read the first two pages of
Anti-Oedipus. There you'll see the enormous debt. Canetti is not quoted at all, but Judge Schreber, Freud's best test case, is. And Canetti devotes a significant part of the conclusion of
Crowds and Power to this same wacko mental patient, this Judge Schreber, who felt little people crawling all over him, and God bombarding him with rays.
g Evidence two for a reluctance to give Canetti his due: at the end of his introduction to
Anti-Oedipus, Foucault calls the book "An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life." But this could certainly be
Crowds and Power: the section on the Survivor in the crowd is the original
real introduction to non-fascist life, and a concern for fascism is all over Canetti's book. Crowds walk hand in hand with fascism, lynch mobs, etc. This is the fascist dream,
vis-a-vis crowds: everyone wants to be a survivor, this is the way crowds really work, they are working especially to form survivors, but within the crowd there is only one who will ultimately be a survivor, and everyone has the same delusional survivor dream of out-surviving all others.
g (The fleeing crowd also recalls the Deleuzian "line of flight" taken by schizos, nomads, artists...some have noted the "danger" of the kinds of crowds Obama likes to draw, but I think these crowds are more fleeing crowds than revolutionary crowds.)
g There is a reference to
Crowds and Power in
Anti-Oedipus, a very good one, but it comes much later than the first page, where Judge Schreber takes a place of such honor. There is much citation all throughout, however, of Judge Schreber, and I think that the proper citation for him is not the primary Freud but the secondary Canetti.
g Canetti's book is from 1960;
Anti-Oedipus is from 1972. Unlike the Frenchmen, Canetti is not abstruse in the post-'68 French way; in fact, he is often very simple. When he outlines types of crowds, for instance, he keeps it very simple, with clearly-drawn categories. When he talks about symbols as standing for kinds of crowds, he explains why they should have symbols, which I think is a nod both to Jung and to structuralism, but really not important. Generally, unlike the French theorists, Canetti wants to be as clear as possible.
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