Crowds and Party · 第 111 页

This seeing through others gives us a way to understand “imitative mania.” The object being imitated is not a specific person but prestige itself, the press and presence of the many, crowd, or mass. Lacan reminds us, “Whenever we are dealing with imitation, we should be careful not to think too quickly of the other who is being imitated.”⁴⁰ Imitating a leader or celebrity, the many act for each other, showing themselves in their admiring enthusiasm to themselves, making themselves the objects of their own collective gaze. When fans dress up as characters in a movie to attend a movie’s opening (as with the Harry Potter or Star Wars movies) or when they go in costume to fan conventions, they are doing it for each other. As they see themselves seeing themselves, they demonstrate the contingency and replaceability of the revered leader: any one of those imitatively adopting the leader’s characteristics is in the leader’s place.

Imitative mania, then, demonstrates the collectivity distorted in the pathology of “absolute idolatry.”⁴¹ The point of imitation is not the adoration of one, of a leader or celebrity. It is that the one is nothing but the thing enabling the many to experience its collective force. Enthusiasm arises out of this experience of collective imitation because the collective feels itself amplified, strengthened. Enthusiasm is nothing but this collective sense of collective power. In imitative mania, what is being imitated is not a person; it is prestige, the regard of the collective.

Identification is similarly unconscious. Michels observes that a powerful speaker can hypnotize the crowd “to such a degree that for long periods to come they see in him a magnified image of their own ego … In responding to the appeal of the great orator, the mass is unconsciously influenced by its own egoism.”⁴² Michels is ambiguous here, eliding the distinction between individual and crowd. Is his point that each individual separately identifies with the leader or that the crowd qua mass exhibits its own egoism? If the former, Michels loses the ability to say something about the crowd. If the latter, the speaker would be a vehicle for generating this other ego, this perspective capable of enduring, unconsciously, after the speech ends. The ambiguity, the slippage, affirms the latter point insofar as the speaker becomes an opportunity for collective force to exert itself.

Just as the distinctions between technical and psychological tendencies to oligarchy blur into and reinforce one another, so do the distinctions between crowd and leader, mass and party. Each twists into the other. Each ruptures the other from within, preventing it from achieving self-identity. For example, Michels emphasizes the importance of detachments from the bourgeoisie aligning themselves with the proletariat and animating its class consciousness. These members of the bourgeoisie —“philosophers, economists, sociologists, and historians”—help transform instinctive, unconscious rebellion into clear, conscious aspiration. Michels writes,

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