‘Crowded Places Are Everywhere We Go’: Crowds,Emergency,Politics

Abstract

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination.

Keywords

Canetti crowds emergency Foucault psychosocial approaches security

In 2009, the UK Home office and the UK-based company Secure Futures organized a competition for young architects to incorporate protective security measures into ‘crowded places’. The competition ‘Public Spaces, Safer Places’ followed Lord West’s report and recommendation to increase protective security and include counter-terrorism protection in the design of ‘crowded places’ (Home Office, 2009). The brief asked young architects to redesign a public square in an unidentified European city, which had been completely destroyed after a horrific terrorist attack involving both pedestrian- and vehicle-delivered explosive devices. The competition – which received about 100 entries and was won by the architect Peter Hughes with a project entitled ‘The Dove and the Olive Branch’ – highlighted the new problematization of terrorism as unexpected and surprising attacks in ‘crowded places’. Unknowable and unpredictable events are reformulated as governable emergencies in ‘crowded places’. Crowded places are a recent invention in counter-terrorism, a new object of governing which needs to be explained and known: most of the governmental reports start with the question ‘What are crowded places?’ and offer different taxonomies by way of definition. The company Secure Futures defines ‘crowded places’ as a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, largely the equivalent of the social:

Crowded places are everywhere we go. They are the high street and the shopping centre, the station platform and the bus queue, the busy cinema and the sold-out venue. They are the public spaces we use. Crowded places are also where we are at our most vulnerable to attack and emergency. (Secure Futures, 2010)

At the same time that the competition for architects was unfolding, the problematization of ‘crowded places’ was also at the heart of counter-terrorism preparedness exercises (National Counter Terrorism Security Office, 2010), government consultation and subsequent guidance on ‘working together to protect crowded places’ (Home Office, 2009; Home Office and Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012; Home Office et al., 2012), and policing and emergency planning reports (Cabinet Office, 2009a, 2009b). As locations where crowds are present and vulnerable to terrorism, crowded places reactivate the figure of the crowd at the heart of counter-terrorism. From the protection of citizens and the nation, counter-terrorism insidiously shifts its concern to crowds, which give substance to ‘crowded places’. It is in the move from the passive attribute of ‘crowded places’ to the more active attribution of ‘crowd behaviour’ that crowds function as connectors between counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing.

Therefore, the problematization of crowded places creates a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing, while the crowd referent activates particular modes of governmental knowledge and practice. Rather than dispersed and abstract populations, which are assembled through statistical techniques of risk management, crowds activate psychological knowledge about collective behaviour in concrete spaces. The government of populations takes hold of a ‘global mass affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on’ (Foucault, 2004: 243). Alongside individual bodies to be normalized or populations to be governed through a modulated calculus of risk, crowds haunt governmental knowledge and practice. Neither populations nor people, crowds are both objects of intense regulation and political subjects, who disrupt the order and arrangements of power. Governing crowds depends upon different modalities of psychosocial knowledge about collective behaviour and its affective economies.

How do these modes of knowledge about crowds recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that three subtle reconfigurations are taking place. First, in counter-terrorism preparedness, crowds are derived from the generic event of a ‘terrorist attack’.¹ Generic events in crowded places make possible the reconfiguration of workplaces as ‘crowded places’ and of workers as crowds. At the same time, governing crowded places reactivates 19th-century crowd psychology. Even as Gustave Le Bon’s conservative view of crowds as pathological and irrational has been discredited in historical and sociological literature, its tropes infuse contemporary sites of security governance. Second, in emergency planning and policing, crowds are differently derived, not from the generic event, but from normal social relations as ‘generic crowds’. A different mode of knowledge, a psychosocial approach that takes a social identity view and reclaims the rationality of crowds, is deployed in direct opposition to the pathologization of crowds. However, in the continuum counter-terrorism–emergency planning–policing, generic crowds as rational, cooperative and resilient flounder under the generic event conceptualization.² Moreover, the derivation of crowds from unexpected events and social relations has depoliticizing effects, as crowds are either tamed through preparedness exercises and spatio-temporal ordering, or they are subordinated to the status quo of existing social relations. In this way, the politically disruptive potential of crowds is foreclosed. The third section challenges the depoliticization of crowds by engaging with a different knowledge about crowds, which is eschewed in security governance: Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. I suggest that resisting the depoliticization of crowds implies rethinking generic politics as negating derivation and determination.

Governing ‘Crowded Places’: Generic Events

At the horizon of the potentially catastrophic ‘next terrorist attack’, the modes of knowledge underpinning emergency planning have been changing. Stephen Collier (2008) has argued that there has been a move away from the archival-statistical knowledge involved in risk prevention to an enactment knowledge that is produced by ‘acting out’ future threats in order to understand their societal impact. Lee Clarke (2005) has named it possibilistic knowledge, whose basis in the imagination of the unthinkable supplements the probabilistic knowledge of risk management. Others have added imaginative knowledge (Anderson, 2010), speculative knowledge (Cooper, 2008; De Goede, 2012), or conjectural knowledge (Aradau and van Munster, 2011) to the list. While all these modes of knowledge locate a transformation of the calculus of risk and probability, less attention has been paid to the subjects invoked and fostered by these modes of knowledge.

The emergence of ‘crowded places’ as objects of terrorist ‘methodology’ draws attention to the crowd-subject rather than dispersed populations to be gathered through risk calculations or individual citizens to be disciplined and rendered vigilant. The importance of crowds for governing terrorist events became evident to me while observing a series of counter-terrorism exercises, called Project ARGUS, across the UK in 2009 and 2010. The assumptions about crowd behaviour underpinning the exercises were even more surprising, as the exercises were intended for businesses that might be affected by a terrorist attack. As the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) describes it:

Project ARGUS is an interactive counter-terrorism tabletop exercise designed to put you and your business in the midst of a simulated terrorist attack as a multi-media experience. The aim of ARGUS is to increase awareness of counter-terrorism issues and help make us more resilient as a community.³

The ARGUS exercises are delivered by local counter-terrorism security advisers (CTSAs) in police forces around the UK, local authority emergency planning teams, and fire and health emergency services. Project ARGUS also responds to the government consultation on protective security and a series of three documents which outline security measures to be taken by the police, local authorities, businesses, planners, architects and all citizens: Working Together to Protect Crowded Places (Home Office, 2009), Crowded Places: The Planning System and Counter-terrorism (Home Office and Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012), and Protecting Crowded Places: Design and Technical Issues (Home Office et al., 2012). Directed at businesses with the explicit aim of ensuring ‘business continuity’ (National Counter Terrorism Security Office, 2003), ARGUS exercises extend concerns with terrorism in public spaces into the realm of organizations and private spaces.

The exercises start with a video simulation of an unexpected terrorist attack in a crowded place: a square, a shopping centre, a nightclub, a hotel and so on. The participants watch the attack as it unravels on the screen, while being directed in their actions and responses by the CTSAs.⁴ At the beginning of exercises, CTSAs offer a depiction of terrorism and locate potential terrorist attacks in crowded places. Among the locations singled out as having been previous targets of attack, there are shopping centres, nightclubs, airports and restaurants, which connect past knowledge of terrorism with future events that are presumed to follow similar methodologies.

As the NaCTSO list of crowded places has expanded to include ‘bars, pubs and night clubs; restaurants and hotels; shopping centres; sports and entertainment stadia; cinemas and theatres; visitor attractions; major events; commercial centres; health sector; education sector; and religious sites/places of worship’ (Home Office, 2009: 11), so have ARGUS exercises. The supposed prominence of these locations as potential targets of terrorist attacks is given both in terms of access and effect to be achieved: ‘They are easily accessible and appear to lend themselves to maximum destruction’ (Home Office, 2009). The video simulation is set up as a series of episodes, each requiring particular responses or leading to ‘lesson learning’: ‘Attack Part 1’, ‘Attack Part 2’ and ‘Attack Part 3’.

In Attack Part 1, participants hear sounds that appear to indicate a bomb explosion. After watching the introduction, the CTSA reads out the scenario to which the participants are then asked to respond. For instance, a session dedicated to architects and planners in London is focused around a hotel and its surroundings:

The Enterprise Tower Hotel is a New York style boutique hotel with the facilities of brand hotels. It has 240 guest rooms. On a first floor, there are a business centre and conference facilities. The reception is positioned between two restaurants. It is 11.20 am. All of the 38 rooms expected to check out have done so. The conference is running late as they have to break for the 11.30 break. You notice a van parked in front of the hotel. (Research notes from ARGUS exercise, London, 21 August 2009)

The explosion happens. There are no images; the screen goes blank, we hear screams, cries of help, it is chaotic and terrifying. The film stops, and the CTSA intervenes to ask participants to identify the features that increase vulnerability and discuss the measures that could be put in place to reduce vulnerability. At first sight, these exercises appear focused on making worst-case scenarios thinkable and actionable and preparing participants to inhabit potential disasters and catastrophes to come (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson and Adey, 2011a; Aradau and van Munster, 2011). Yet, before long, the crowd question becomes central to these preparedness exercises.

In the standard ARGUS exercises, dedicated to high street businesses, the emphasis is on crowd behaviour and response. How are people likely to behave and what measures should be taken in response to these behaviours? Secure Futures encapsulates the problem that ARGUS exercises purport to address:

Crowds and public places are very difficult to protect and if tragedy or danger strikes, it can often mean mass casualties, major damage as well as widespread panic and fear. There is a loss of control, communication and containment. (Secure Futures, 2010)

In Attack Part 2, the problem of crowd behaviour becomes starker: ‘15 minutes have passed. There is the sound of another explosion. The staff are panicking and want to leave.’⁵ In the ARGUS exercises, participants are told that leadership is essential in these moments to limit crowd panic. In further guidance for emergency professionals in the UK, crowd management experts emphasize the importance of leadership and communication with the crowd:

Leader figures – either from the authorities or from within the crowd itself – play an important role in the evacuation process. Individuals who are clearly told or shown what to do by a leader figure are likely to respond in a more timely and appropriate manner, since communication lessens the uncertainty of the situation. (Cabinet Office, 2009a: 61)

What is needed in emergency times, exercise wisdom teaches, is a ‘strong leader’ who can assuage panic and fear among the crowds.

The ARGUS exercises activate old tropes from the 19th-century psychology of crowds, associated most infamously with Gustave Le Bon. For Le Bon, crowds are destructive of liberal autonomy and individualism; they are emotional and driven to extremes. Moreover, the behaviour of crowds directly relates to their excessive imagination: ‘How is the imagination of the crowds to be impressed?’ (Le Bon, 1996 [1895]: 62). The collective imagination of crowds works through emotional contagion and suggestibility, thus rendering the crowd almost blind to truth (Le Bon, 1996 [1895]: 24). Imagination and emotion, as opposed to intelligence and rationality, make crowds regress to the level of the unconscious, and of the sub-human.⁶ Even though all these assumptions have long been criticized in the anthropology and sociology of disasters (Oliver-Smith, 1996; Tierney, 2007), as well as in psychosocial approaches to crowd behaviour (Drury et al., 2009; Reicher et al., 2004), they are reactivated in response to unexpected terrorist attacks.

The ‘suggestibility’ of crowds, the need for leadership, the crowd’s propensity to act as ‘one’ and lead to the transformation of the individual into an anonymized element of the crowd are all ideas that are continually displayed in counter-terrorism exercises. From a concert stadium to a demonstration or a shopping place, undifferentiated crowds and their unstable affects need to be channelled by a leader. The economic subjects who congregate in shopping centres and other public spaces can dangerously morph into potentially destructive and panicked crowds (Aradau, 2010). Nominating key individuals as leaders is seen to help tame the potential violence of crowds, reduce panic and steer their actions.

Unruly crowds are produced not only in the video simulation, but also in the physical set-up of exercises. ARGUS exercises imagine two crowd-subjects: the crowd which embodies potential disorder and panic, and the crowd as orderly social group, which can follow nominated leaders and restore the situation to normality. The imaginary of disruptive crowds versus crowds as orderly social groups is reproduced through spatio-temporal strategies. The exercise participants are seated according to a clearly defined plan, which is given in emergency planning manuals and is reproduced from event to event (Dillon, 2009). Numbers are also carefully kept in check and participants distributed in small groups around syndicate tables. The distinction between crowds emerges through the gap between temporal interruption on the screen – the unexpected event – and the linear temporality of the exercise.⁷ The emergency response unfolds according to clock time: each time interval requires predetermined actions and processes. The first 5 minutes are about communicating with those around, 15 minutes about ‘taking control’, 40 minutes about reassuring those around, 2 hours about working together with the emergency services; longer times are about business continuity and return to normality (Aradau and van Munster, 2012).

Crowds are differentiated and made governable through a particular derivation from unexpected and unpredictable events. The assumption seems to be that generic events, which are unpredictable, unexpected and potentially catastrophic, will trigger particular crowd behaviours. This temporality of the potentially catastrophic attack translates into panic, emotion and irrationality, which are then ‘tamed’ through recourse to linear temporality and contained spaces. Crowd behaviour is not explored in the ARGUS exercises any more than the terrorist attack. This derivation of crowds from events is not new, but effectively implied in Le Bon’s crowd psychology. Le Bon’s Psychology of the Revolution makes clear that crowds are the ‘agent of a revolution’, where revolution is understood in much broader terms than the French Revolution to encompass ‘all sudden transformation, or transformations apparently sudden’ (Le Bon, 2001 [1912]: 11). Governing crowded places relies on the derivation of crowd-subjects from the generic event of a catastrophe-to-come. This derivation makes possible a more insidious shift, in which workplaces are rendered as crowded places and workers are governed as crowds.

ARGUS exercises unfold in workplaces. The exercise participants are not the people in the street, the passers-by or the window shoppers, they are the security guards, human resources managers, security and safety managers, architects, doctors, bar owners, and so on. They are the leaders whose responses to terrorism are fostered in the ARGUS exercises, while the crowds whose behaviour is governed in the case of an unexpected event are the workers. Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith made clear this relation between workplaces, workers and crowded places:

Smith said that 30,000 workers had been trained to help respond to a terror attack as part of the strategy, and said that programme would be extended to a further 30,000 people. The home secretary denied it amounted to ‘snooping’. She said: ‘If terrorists want to target crowded places, the places where we live, work and play, I think it’s right that we put in place, as we have done, a programme of training for the people that manage our shopping centres, pubs, restaurants, clubs and hotels. That’s what we’re doing to help people be vigilant of the threat from terrorism and to deal with a terrorist attack were it to happen.’ (Percival, 2009)

Smith’s comments draw attention to the fact that those trained in counter-terrorism exercises are workers around the country. The fact that exercises do not just take place in big urban areas, with dense populations, but also in Doncaster or Dunstable, reinforces the work–counter-terrorism connector. It is the workplace that is the crowded place and the workers who are configured as crowds. The problematization of ‘crowded places’ thus insidiously shifts from the imaginary of public spaces to work spaces and reproduces assumptions of workers as potentially disruptive and unruly crowds. In responding to the generic event of terrorism, crowds are differentiated depending on their capacity to follow leaders and apply preparedness guidance and training.

A double depoliticizing move takes place: on the one hand, the disruptive potential of crowds is foreclosed; on the other, workers are reconfigured as crowds that need to be tamed and governed to deal with unexpected events. This is not, however, the only modality of knowledge about crowds. In emergency planning and policing in the UK, different voices have argued for a new approach that rejects the irrationality hypothesis and aims to repoliticize crowds. The next section turns to the production of generic crowds in a continuum of counter-terrorism–policing–emergency planning.

Emergency Planning: Policing Generic Crowds

In parallel with this recalibration of counter-terrorism around crowded places, the UK Cabinet Office commissioned a series of reports, collectively titled Understanding Crowd Behaviours (Cabinet Office, 2009a, 2009b). The reports, drafted by academics at Leeds University, were incorporated in the UK Civil Protection Guidance and UK Resilience. The reports aimed to assess crowd behaviour in both normal and emergency situations. The project on Understanding Crowd Behaviours reviews the literature on crowds, starting with Gustave Le Bon, briefly noting the contributions by Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson, and moving quickly to an in-depth review of psychosocial theories of crowd behaviour. It rejects ideas about irrationality and criminality in crowd behaviour and places itself in direct opposition to Le Bon’s influential ideas about crowds. Its guidance is drawn from the Elaborated Social Identity Model of crowd management, developed by the psychologists Stephen Reicher at the University of St Andrews, John Drury at Sussex University and Clifford Stott at Liverpool University.⁸

At about the same time that new guidance for emergency planning was put in place, similar contributions were made to policing practices. One of the representatives of social identity approaches to crowd management, Clifford Stott, contributed to another report on policing protest, this time commissioned by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary (HMIC), the organization charged with monitoring police performance.⁹ In this report, Stott also rejects traditional crowd psychology, which he argues informed policing practices in England and Wales, in favour of the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) of crowd behaviour, which is seen as ‘the leading scientific theory of crowd psychology’ (HMIC, 2009). ESIM, notes Stott, ‘recognises the contextually determined nature of crowd action and defines the social psychological processes determining the positive and negative impacts that police tactics can have upon crowd dynamics’ (HMIC, 2009: 80).

These reports produce another mode of knowledge about crowds, explicitly set in opposition to pathological assumptions about crowd behaviour. The representatives of social identity models of crowd behaviour relocate crowds at the heart of social scientific analysis in order to transform the governance of public order and emergency (Reicher, 2011). In a recent analysis of emergency planning guidance in the UK, they note the continued predominance of vulnerability and panic in representations of collectives, particularly crowds (Drury et al., 2013).The social identity model of crowd behaviour embraces constructivist approaches to social identity and sees itself as reacting against the predominant pathologization of crowds, inherited from 19th-century psychological, criminological and social theory (Le Bon, 1996 [1895]; Sighele, 1901; Tarde, 1989 [1901]). In the knowledge produced by these psychosocial models, crowd behaviour is derived from normal group behaviour rather than unexpected events, thereby producing a ‘generic crowd’ model. At first sight, crowds appear as manifestly different from the crowds problematized in counter-terrorism.

The ESIM has indeed set out to deconstruct the assumptions of crowd irrationality, panic, de-individuation and dominance by emotions. ESIM scholars recognize and make explicit Le Bon’s deeply conservative political project, by drawing attention to how assumptions about crowd behaviour are in fact derived from particular (de)valuations of political events such as revolutions, revolts and struggles. Le Bon’s (1996 [1895]) concern is ultimately with the potential destruction of the hierarchy that holds society together and a regression to what he sees as the unconscious of primitive equality. Since the 1980s, Stephen Reicher has challenged Le Bon’s pathologization of crowds by resituating crowds within struggles, political grievances and social conflicts:

If Le Bon’s concern was with the working class crowds of late nineteenth-century France, no sense is given of the grievances and social conflicts which led angry demonstrators to assemble. Perhaps more strikingly still, Le Bon writes of crowd events as if crowds were acting in isolation, as if the police or army or company guards who they confronted were absent, and as if the violent actions directed from one party to another were the random gyrations of the crowd alone. (Reicher, 2001: 186)

For Drury and Reicher (2009), Le Bon’s narrative of crowds as anarchic and following atavistic goals needs to be replaced with a narrative of progress and collective resilience. According to Reicher (2001), Le Bon divorces crowds from social context and effaces inter-group relations, for instance the interaction between crowds and police. Thus, it is not the unexpected event but the formation of generic crowds that becomes the focus of attention. Reicher argues that crowds are constituted from a motley of people who continue to behave normally even in emergency situations. It is this continuity of norms and social ties that leads ESIM scholars to argue that crowds ‘often remain organised and cooperative in emergency situations’ (Cabinet Office, 2009b: 146). This reading of crowd behaviour downplays emergency events in favour of the continuity of social relations. The exceptional and unexpected event is subordinated to the normality of everyday social relations, family ties and values, which characterize crowds even in emergency situations. This is what unites the very different types of crowds that infuse social life and gives them their generic rationality.

Instead of being derived from the ‘generic event’, crowd behaviour is derived from typical crowd members and social categories of self-understanding. Embedded in social norms and values, crowds show resilience and cooperation, often under the guidance of a leader. As pointed out in the reports for the UK Cabinet Office, this approach offers a model of crowd behaviour based on the ‘explanation of the collective sociality of crowds, i.e., helping, cooperation and coordination behaviours displayed by individuals who do not know each other in emergency situations’ (Cabinet Office, 2009b: 146). Leaders do not need to be allocated as in the counter-terrorism exercises; they emerge from pre-existing social relations, as the experience of an emergency situation transforms a ‘physical crowd’ into a ‘psychological crowd’. In these terms, a physical crowd is simply a multitude of people, while a psychological crowd has a shared social identity. It is not sheer multitude that creates a qualitative difference in crowd behaviour, but the application of social categories. Crowds decrease the salience of individual identities in favour of a shared social identity (Cabinet Office, 2009b: 126).

The ESIM is based on a particular understanding of identity – rather than identity being dissipated within the vital energy of the crowd, as earlier approaches seemed to suggest, crowds are effectively a social group with a social identity. Crowds are analysed as interactive group phenomena, ultimately not different from everyday groups and social relations. What matters for understanding how to interact with crowds and govern potential emergencies is the in-group/out-group dynamics:

Barriers between differing groups within the crowd most notably the peaceful majority and the troublesome minority will be overpowered by the unitary action of the crowd against the police, for example, and a new, more inclusive categorisation will result (Drury & Reicher, 2005). The crowd, perceiving their treatment by police to not only be illegitimate but also indiscriminate, come to adopt a more inclusive self-categorisation (Drury et al., 2005). As a result of this common categorisation, a sense of collective empowerment emerges within the crowd … (Cabinet Office, 2009b: 115)

In order to examine the process of social identity formation, crowds are broken down into smaller groups – extensions of friends and families or groups who interact with each other and, at the same time, interact with ‘external groups’, for instance the police. Although particular crowd behaviours would differ depending on the social norms and the make-up of the crowd, the generic crowd is a derivation of social norms and identity. The generic crowd is the crowd-as-community, defined by social identity, norms and goals.¹⁰

If generic crowds are derivative of these social relations, contagion and suggestibility are reined in, though not entirely removed from these approaches to crowd behaviour. The construction of common identity through group interaction is not far from ideas of emotional contagion and suggestibility. How else would a crowd change its self-understanding in response to police action?

As a consequence of being impeded in carrying out such ‘legitimate’ activities and in response to being treated as dangerous and oppositional by the police, ‘moderate’ crowd members in turn came to see the police as an illegitimate opposition. Furthermore, having experienced a common fate at the hands of the police, previously disparate crowd members came to see themselves as part of a common category even with more radical elements from whom they had previously felt distanced. (Reicher, 2001: 201)

To avoid mismanaged interaction, the social identity approach to crowd behaviour emphasizes communication, leadership and identification processes. Instead of channelling the ‘madness of crowds’ or hypnotizing them into action, leaders are now part of a partnership for ‘social-identity based collective agency’ (Reicher et al., 2005). They remain indispensable to the socialization of crowds as normal groups of people and to collective action as derivative of group identity.

Crowd management becomes a matter of negotiating inter-group relations and convincing crowds of the legitimacy of particular interventions. Even when crowds engage in actions which are ‘perceived to turn the world “upside down”’ (Drury and Reicher, 2009: 718), their identity-based rendition ultimately means that there is no fundamental difference between crowds and the police. Understood as social groups, both can become dominant and re-assert their identity and respective definitions of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate action. The potential reversal of positions is evident in the interpretation that Clifford Scott has offered of the student demonstrations in London on 9 December 2010. The problem of policing the student protests is recast as a problem of perceptions of legitimacy and of communication:

[T]he police needed to communicate with the crowd about what was required, necessary and legitimate. But that didn’t happen – there was simply no communication with the crowd. Inevitably, the police were forced to move toward containment. But even if that were necessary, they should have had elements of the police ready to communicate during the containment itself, to assist in dynamic risk assessment, and straight away they should have started working with the crowd to work out who was and wasn’t a risk. The vast bulk of the crowd were students who simply wanted to protest and then go home. (The Psychologist News, 2011: 87, emphasis added)

In this approach, crowds are recast as orderly subjects who are ultimately indistinguishable from community-based relations or groups of citizens. For instance, crowds that do not want to go home in an orderly manner are implicitly pathologized. Ideas about crowd panic, pathology and conflict do not disappear – rather, they are restricted to unexpected events and risky sub-groups. The pathologization of crowds insidiously morphs into the pathologization of particular crowd-subjects alongside the requirement for more intensive crowd self-regulation (Durrheim and Foster, 1999). Crowds are not only generically derived from social identity, they are also are differentiated according to their social identity and relative amenability to control. For instance, if the police communicate particular rules of behaviour and particular expectations of route, crowds that do not conform are rearticulated as pathological.¹¹

This rearticulation is made possible by the security continuum of counter-terrorism–emergency planning–policing. The unexpected, unpredictable event of a terrorist attack is the main imaginary of interruption in emergency planning and policing as well. Even when other events – such as violent protest – are envisaged, they are modelled on this generic event. This is evident in the coinage of ‘no surprises policing’, in which generic events and generic crowds merge: ‘no surprises for the police; no surprises for protestors; and no surprises for protest targets’ (Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2009). As long as surprises do not occur, crowds remain social, an extension of social norms and identity. Representation and social categorization undergird group dynamics. Conflicts between crowds and police require either a better management of social categorization or a better understanding of the group’s social norms. While framed in opposition to 19th-century psychology, these assumptions about crowd behaviour paradoxically reinsert depoliticizing assumptions about collectivity and political events at the heart of social and political life. Crowds morph into identity-based communities and thereby limit the subversive event of crowd emergence and political dis-identification. Political events and struggles are reduced to miscommunication or inadvertent mismanagement of social categorizations, which appear easily rectifiable rather than disruptive. The opposition between Le Bonnian crowd psychology and psychosocial approaches to crowd behaviour does not address the formation of crowds through derivation from unexpected events or social relations. Through the continuum of counter-terrorism–emergency planning–policing, generic crowds and generic events become entwined, so that crowds disappear as full-fledged political subjects. The final section turns to the politics of crowds in order to recapture an understanding of crowds as political and propose a different conception of generic politics.

Becoming Crowd and Generic Politics

Both the pathologization and rationalization of crowds have been resisted in a different rendering of the crowd question, which sees crowds as not derivative from but disruptive of social norms (Borch, 2012; Brighenti, 2011; Mazzarella, 2010). In order to rethink the politicality of crowds, this literature draws on Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Canetti, 1987 [1960]). Revisiting Canetti is particularly interesting as he is conspicuously absent from the psychosocial debates on crowd behaviour. Drury and Reicher (2009) refer to Canetti’s Crowds and Power in the title of one of their articles, without, however, engaging any further with his work. On the rare occasions when Canetti surfaces in this literature, he appears mostly associated with irrational 19th-century psychology of crowds. For instance, David Waddington (2008) has criticized this view for leading to ‘dangerously repressive and unenlightened techniques of crowd control’ and a ‘return’ to the group-mind theory, to the irrationality of crowds. Waddington refers to Christian Borch’s (2009: 271) interpretation of Canetti, which argues that ‘the bodily compression of crowds in fact liberates individuals and creates a democratic transformation’. Rather than pathological or social, crowds are rendered as democratic political subjects.

Canetti’s absence from the knowledge underpinning the counter-terrorism–emergency planning–policing continuum is symptomatic of the absence of politics from security governance. Crowds are rational as long as they exist in ‘controlled’ situations, with identifiable leaders, clear identities, norm abidance and clear hierarchies. This representation of generic crowds continuously leaves out political events and disruptive crowds, who do not justify their actions in the language of dominant social norms. What about those who do not want to just protest and go home, to follow up on Stott’s analysis of the student protests in London 2010?

It is not my purpose here to offer an exegesis of Canetti – space does not allow it and many have done so at length and with great acumen (Arnason, 1996; Brighenti, 2011; McClelland, 1996; Roberts, 1996). I focus, instead, on one particular episode in Canetti’s seminal book – the strike – to draw out a different understanding of crowds as political, which does not derive politics from collective affect as suggested by Borch and Brighenti. Canetti’s analysis of strikes opens up a different engagement with workplaces, unexpected and unpredictable events, and generic politics.

For Canetti, there is no generic, derivative crowd, even as he starts with a series of attributes of all crowds. There are also no generic events. The attributes of crowds immediately translate into different types of crowds: open and closed crowds, stagnating and rhythmic crowds, slow and quick crowds, visible and invisible crowds. Crowds are then distinguished by their predominant emotions: baiting crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds, reversal crowds and feast crowds (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 65). The workers who strike become a ‘prohibition crowd’, a crowd of refusal, negation and resistance, which emerges through disconnecting from the coordinates of the workplace. It is the event of the strike that creates a particular crowd:

As long as they [the workers] were working they had very varied things to do, and everything they did was prescribed. But, when they stop work, they all do the same thing. It is as though their hands had all dropped at exactly the same moment and now they had to exert all their strength not to lift them up again, however hungry their families. Stopping work makes the workers equals. Their concrete demands are actually of less importance than the effect of this moment. The aim of the strike may be a wage increase, and they certainly feel at one in this aim. But by itself it is not enough to make a crowd out of them. (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 64)

The strike is not a generic event; it is a singular happening in the space of work. Its effects emerge through systematic denial and reworking of the processes, relations and spaces of work. Workplaces are hierarchical spaces of unfreedom and the emergence of a ‘crowd’ challenges this unfreedom. If a form of equality appears present in the workplace, it is an alienated equality, the subordination of all to the requirements of production. Workspaces are disciplinary spaces, where bodies are rendered docile and equal only to the extent to which they are all subordinated to the same surveillance (Foucault, 1991). As all action is prescribed, the apparent equality of all workers is also underpinned by practices of domination and hierarchy. For Canetti, it is the production of ‘real equality’ in the workplace that constitutes the crowd.

The constitution of crowds is the political event that reconfigures the generic differently. Generic politics is not derived, but opposed to determination and derivation through disconnection and disruption. At the same time, generic politics is singular in its happening, its particular modalities of disconnection. The event of the strike is not a coup de foudre, which strikes unexpectedly and changes a situation. It emerges out of the dynamics of the workplace and it disrupts these dynamics. The strike is prepared, organized and lived through. The strike requires the organization of unity to avert the danger of strike-breakers, the organization of space with pickets and alternative means of protection, and the organization of food and money distribution. The assumptions about work and society are inverted in the practice of the strike as everybody receives ‘equally little’ (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 65). However, notes Canetti, ‘It does not occur to the strong to think that they should have more, and even the greedy are satisfied with their portion’ (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 65). The workplace is changed and normal social relations are transformed. The emergence of the crowd is a systematic disruption of assumptions about the world and the workplace. Neither grievances nor social identity are sufficient in themselves to constitute a crowd. Canetti argues that the workers’ demands might be less important than the moment of real equality achieved through stopping work. The coming together and the inscription of equality are as important as the workers’ grievances.

Prohibition crowds differ from the many other forms of crowds that Canetti analyses, both through their emotion and through their dynamics. For instance, the prohibition crowd is opposed to the flight crowd, the crowd created by a threat. Not only do singular events give rise to differentiated crowds, but their internal dynamics and the processing of these dynamics have effects on how the crowd acts. The flight crowd has a strong sense of direction, which gives it coherence and diminishes fear. Even where the loss of fear was one of the attributes of crowds, fear is processed differently in each crowd depending on the event they face. The starting assertion ‘[t]he more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other’ (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: d16) transforms with the flight crowd: ‘As long as it remains one powerful and undivided river and does not allow itself to be dispersed and split, so long does the fear by which it is driven remain bearable’ (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 61). The flight crowd does not spell the end of fear, it diminishes fear through preserving its compact togetherness. The prohibition crowd, on the other hand, banishes fear.

The politics of crowds is thus both generic in its substantive disconnection and singular in its actualization. In becoming political, crowds are enmeshed with power relations, they can fail or succeed, promote equality or destruction. To return to the prohibition crowd, the strikes can also become destructive. ‘As soon as they feel the unity of their stand threatened’, Canetti notes, ‘they incline towards destruction, and particularly towards destruction in the sphere of their own familiar activity’ (Canetti, 1987 [1960]: 66). The transformation of the strike takes place in relation to an event – the threat of disunity – and in relation to the organizational equality that has been set in place. If a generic event of subversion is the starting point of action, events cannot remain generic any more than crowds do. Singular events give rise to differentiated dynamics. The integration of emergency planning, counter-terrorism and protests in a security continuum effaces singular events and singular crowds. The imaginary of a generic event modelled on terrorism, which circulates across the security continuum, pre-empts the politicization of crowds. Crowds at airports, in stadia or in the urban square are similarly governed through the institution of hierarchy, leadership and communication, whether crowds are imagined as irrational and easily panicked or as meaning-laden and cooperative. The differentiation of crowds also means that crowds are not interchangeable, as they are constituted through varied social processes. Police and crowds could thus not be interchangeable as in-/out-groups, as proposed by the social identity model of crowd behaviour.

This understanding of crowds challenges the main assumptions of security governance, whether still drawn from 19th-century imaginaries of crowd psychology or from more recent psychosocial reformulations. Crowds have the potential to disrupt institutions and power relations, to disconnect from the status quo, and challenge the fictions of freedom and equality through momentary enactments of ‘real’ freedom and equality. Yet, these aspects have been absent from debates about security governance recalibrated around crowded places and crowd behaviour.

Concluding Remarks

This article has started from the recent proliferation of discourse about crowded places and crowd behaviour in the context of counter-terrorism and emergency planning to unpack the resurgence of crowds at the heart of security knowledge and practice. Counter-terrorism has been reformulated as a problem of governing unexpected events in crowded places and – by extension – as a problem of crowd behaviour. Emergency planning and policing are increasingly transformed by different knowledge of crowds, which derives them from normal social interaction and norms. Calibrated around crowds, the security continuum of counter-terrorism–emergency planning–policing entails depoliticizing effects.

In a first step, I have shown how the problematization of crowded places reactivates19th-century psychological assumptions about crowds and extends these to workplaces, where workers are reconfigured as crowds. This move is made possible by deriving an understanding of crowd behaviour from the valuation of generic events as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. While counter-terrorism exercises reproduce 19th-century crowd psychology, emergency planning and policing is increasingly underpinned by different, psychosocial knowledge of crowds. The ESIM model relies on a re-reading of crowds as derivative from social norms and identity. Yet, the spectre of pathological crowds remains, despite these attempts to reformulate assumptions about crowd behaviour. Orderly crowds remain objects of security as generic events risk dislocating social order.

The derivation of crowds from generic events depoliticizes crowds by blocking the political problematization of events and the disruptive politics of crowds. In emergency planning and policing, crowds are equally depoliticized as they are derived from what is and therefore subordinated to normal sociality and status quo. I have suggested that a generic politics of crowds is non-derivative, as crowds emerge through disconnection from the status quo, by disrupting power relations and enacting equality. Yet, a generic politics of crowds is also singular in its actualization, as Canetti’s analysis of crowds and particularly of the strike makes clear. Becoming crowd is thus simultaneously generic and singular.

What are the implications of the politics of crowds for rethinking emergency? Instead of placing emergency within familiar tropes of legality and exception, this article has proposed to analyse emergency as a regime of knowledge and veridiction. Heterogeneous modes of knowledge are mobilized and circulate among fields of practice – counter-terrorism, emergency planning, policing – thereby transforming the practices deployed for the purposes of governance. These modes of knowledge are not just anticipatory; they also produce subjects of governance. If populations or citizens have often been taken for granted as subjects of security governance, crowds have increasingly emerged as a referent that circulates among various security practices. The history of crowds in policing and emergency planning is supplemented by the incursion of the crowd referent in counter-terrorism. Through the creation of a security continuum, the knowledge and governance of crowds is transformed. Thus, governing emergencies is a process of knowledge making, circulation and transformation. These modes of knowledge have depoliticizing effects when they derive crowds from unexpected events or social norms and identity. Thinking the politics of emergency entails thinking the politics of crowds, which I have suggested is non-derivative in its generic disconnectivity, while singular in its actualization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The ideas in this article have been aired in different contexts at the University of Sussex, University of Hamburg, The Open University, Brunel University, BISA Poststructuralist Working Group Workshop on The Political Life of Things , University of Cambridge, and the Copenhagen Business School. I am grateful to the organisers and participants for their generous engagement with the material, and also to the editors and anonymous reviewers for useful critical comments and advice.

Notes

Claudia Aradau is Reader in International Politics in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research has developed a critical political analysis of security practices. She is the author of Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics Out of Security (2008), and co-author, with Rens van Munster, of Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (2011). Her current work pursues a critical exploration of security practices and the politics of knowledge, with a particular focus on how futures are made knowable and actionable for the purposes of security.

This article is from a TCS Special Issue on Governing Emergencies (32.2, March 2015), edited by Peter Adey, Ben Anderson & Stephen Graham.

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