Elias Canetti’s study of the crowd is a theory of collective desire. The crowd assembles libidinal and affective intensities into the force of a longing irreducible to the crowd’s emotion, to the specific excitement or event that calls it together. Canetti classifies crowds with respect to their prevailing emotion—the baiting crowd out for the kill, the flight crowd in which everyone flees, the prohibition crowd that refuses, the reversal crowd turning against those who command or oppress it, and the feast crowd that enjoys in common. What we might think of as the unconscious structure and processes of the crowd, the crowd’s economy of enjoyment, persists through or underneath these different types of crowds. As I discussed in chapter three, this crowd unconscious has four attributes: a desire to grow, a state of absolute equality (which Canetti defines as the “discharge”), a love of density, and a need of direction.
These crowd attributes dynamically generate collective jouissance. The desire to increase, expand, accumulate, and extend infuses even the crowd enclosed in an institution. The urge to grow is ineliminable, a primary impulse of the crowd. Crowds can be open or closed, but even spatial limitations can be breached by the crowd’s desire to grow. Consider, for example, the odd obviousness of majority rule. The weight of number forces itself as the push of the crowd. It exerts as pressure, no matter whether right or wrong, reasonable or not. Even those who object and resist encounter this pressure. Going against the crowd is hard. The crowd wants to pull everything into itself, to take on more and increase itself. Canetti writes, “the crowd never feels itself saturated.”<sup>2</sup>
With the discharge, Canetti offers a view of equality fundamentally different from the psychoanalytic association of equality with envy. Equality in the crowd is dedifferentiation, de-individuation, the momentary release from hierarchy, closure, and separation. “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and that they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it,” Canetti writes. “All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”<sup>3</sup> The press for equality comes not from ressentiment. It’s not born of weakness or deprivation. It comes from the strength of many as it amplifies itself, reinforces itself, and pushes itself back upon itself. With shouts, exclamations, and noise—the spontaneous “utterance in common”—the crowd expresses the equality that is its substance.
The crowd’s density is its indivisibility or degree of solidarity. Understood physiologically, density manifests itself in commonality of feeling, for example, the excitement that passes through the crowd, amplifying and feeding into itself. Close proximity helps here. Canetti pairs equality and density, telling us that in the dancing crowd they coincide. The “skillful enactment of density and equality” engenders the crowd feeling.
The crowd’s direction is its goal. When common, the goal “strengthens the feeling of equality.” The stronger the common goal is, the weaker the individual goals that threaten the crowd’s density. Whereas Le Bon and Freud attribute the crowd’s need for direction to its need for a leader, Canetti makes direction into a process internal to the crowd: direction, common cause, subordinates individual preferences. Everyone belonging to a crowd “carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone.”<sup>4</sup> When the crowd has a direction, when it is moving toward a goal, it can remain dense. Without its goal, the crowd disintegrates into individuals pursuing their own private ends. The goal is outside the crowd, that toward which it is oriented. The goal is not the discharge, although the discharge is the aim.
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