Abstract
The political significance of masses is more obvious than ever. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptualization capable of capturing the dangerous (totalitarian) as well as promising (potentially emancipatory) aspects of masses. It argues that, intricately, the dangers and fruitful potentials of masses are born out of the same fundamental structural features. We may differentiate analytically between different kinds of masses, but all masses contain elements of ambiguity. The mass conceptualization developed builds on a critical, deconstructing interpretation of selected Bataille texts centering on ontological features of individuality and collectivity. Especially, Bataille’s concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘sacrifice’ are accentuated and critically transformed. Contemporary examples of masses – right-wing anti-establishment movements, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter – are presented and reflected through the prism of sacrifice, with the aim of highlighting the multifaceted and complex nature of the dynamics of masses.
The idea of a possible absorption of individuals in a diffuse, collective body belongs essentially to modern mass conceptualizations – just as the combined fascination and horror such visions evoke. A striking articulation thereof was given by Canetti, analyzing in 1960 the transgressive implications of mass demonstrations: ‘The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body’ (1988: 15–16).
From the late 19th century, masses became the subject of vast, cross-disciplinary attention. Modern masses, whether those of the streets or those of public opinion, were diagnosed as nests of individuality loss. Paradoxically, the phenomenon of the mass was seen as modern and archaic at once: nurtured by modern conditions of economic and political life, but itself an expression of regression into a pre-civilized state; a symptom of the fragility of modern individualism and rationalism, and a lurking threat to stable order. 1 Contrastingly, activist theorists of socialist, anarchist or fascist orientation celebrated exactly the potentially destabilizing effects of modern masses. But even revolutionaries rarely embraced the unqualified masses as such, but relied on rationalized mass manifestations, such as ‘the proletariat’, ‘the united front’ or ‘the people’. 2
Arguably, the concept of ‘the mass’ touches upon deep-rooted conceptions of frail boundaries between individuals. Such conceptions have been abundantly present in mythic and religious thinking (presumed spirits passing in-between individuals through gift-giving practices, magic or orgiastic rituals (see Hubert and Mauss, 1981; Mauss, 2001); transubstantiation and holy communion) but have emerged in modern imagination as well, detectable not only in art and entertainment (incorporated in mythical or sci-fi figures, from vampires to future humans), but also in political visions (communal utopianism of counter-cultural movements (Shipley, 2013), or poetic depictions of orgiastic street-dynamics, like those of Canetti).
Today, the political significance of masses is more obvious than ever. Masses become visible as the inescapable basis of parliamentary politics, increasingly approached – by political elites as well as blatant populists – as dynamics to be affected and directed, if not controlled. In addition, social movements such as Black Lives Matter or Yellow Vests constitute subjects of perplexity no less than uneasiness.
Masses are far from ignored, neither by professional politicians, activist or theorists. They are subjects of fear and ambiguous fascination, just as they were a century ago. Yet, the dimension of transindividual experience is hardly thematized to an extent comparable to the passionate interest dedicated to this issue in the late 19th and early 20th century. 3 One could ask, of course, whether transindividual experience was not always a matter of mythologization. Even if still powerful in popular culture, it ought hardly be central to political thinking?
I suggest transindividual experience does indeed belong to the structural characteristics of masses, but not as envisioned by the early mass theorists. Rather than approaching masses as phenomena of regression and collapsed individuality, I suggest masses may be grasped as expressions of a fundamental kind of collective experience which, rather than dissolving the individual into ‘one common body’, involves multiple, open-ended interplays of individual imaginations and projections. From this perspective, mythologization belongs to mass structure in the sense that masses breed on multiplied myth production. But this does not mean that the myth-producing transindividual interplays are themselves unreal.
The development of a mass conceptualization according to these structural intentions may contribute to an understanding of the arguably complex – not primitive – logics of masses. Importantly, this implies no denial of the dangers of masses. Such dangers have been eminently analyzed, especially by thinkers scrutinizing the conditions of totalitarianism. Adorno (1981) found the horrifying ‘identity-thinking’ of Nazism to persevere in modern capitalism; Arendt (1994) emphasized the substantial emptiness of masses due to which they tend to lend themselves limitlessly to ideological manipulation. These analyses are no less pertinent today than in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Nonetheless, I shall bring forward another dimension of masses: transgressive potentials with respect to social roles and stigmatizations. Masses are not formed by clearly identifiable social groups. 4 They are, potentially, centrifuges of social imagination – and forceful rejection of established categories. The intricacy of masses, however, consists in the fact that distinctions between totalitarian tendencies and emancipatory potentials are not always easily drawn. I shall argue that the dangers and fruitful potentials of masses are born out of the same fundamental structural features. We can (and should) differentiate between different kinds of masses, but all masses contain elements of ambiguity.
It is the hope of the article that a better understanding of the complex logics of masses may involve a heightened awareness of the emancipatory and totalitarian dimensions of masses – as well as the specific dynamics that stimulate either one or the other.
The path I shall follow begins with a critical reading of Bataille. He offers an ontological theorization of the relationship between individuality and collectivity, highlighting the irredeemable complexities involved in experiences of connectedness. Moreover, the structure of sacrifice as unfolded by Bataille offers, in my view, a stunningly precise analytical perspective by which we may understand the emancipatory capacities as well as totalitarian tendencies of masses. 5
After a critical reading of selected works of Bataille (Part I), I shall extend and deconstruct some of his core concepts and metaphors (‘sacrifice’, ‘myth’, ‘thinghood’, ‘the ancient chorus’) with the purpose of developing an independent mass-conceptualization (Part II). Subsequently, a discussion of democratic potentials and dangers of masses follows, building on contemporary examples of mass movements (Part III) as well as alternative conceptions of collectivity (Part IV).
I Dramatizing self-loss and human connectedness through myth and sacrifice
In two crucial texts of the late 1930s, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and ‘The College of Sociology’, Bataille illustrates the nature of human connectedness through an analysis of the connectedness of two lovers. Hereby he draws the first contours of an ontology of the individual which will fully bloom in later religious, erotic and aesthetic writings. This early illustration is important, though, because it introduces ‘mythic living’ as a significant structural element in any kind of human connectedness.
According to Bataille, the individual is fundamentally ‘“ajar,” consisting of distant, badly connected, and even unknown parts […] an unfinished aggregate’ (1986: 249). He calls this openness ‘wounds’: unable to uphold ourselves as integrated unities, we crack open, physically and mentally. Communication between humans happens through their wounds; and the silent feverish erotic acts of lovers constitute a particularly intense manifestation thereof: ‘There is no communication more profound: two beings are lost in a convulsion that binds them together. […] Communication ties them together with wounds’ (1986b: 250).
Communication between lovers is, however, no happy ‘melting together’ in which they acquire what they were missing as individuals. There is no way of becoming ‘complete’ through others. Love is based on an initial illusion. The image we create of the person we love – as an image of our own destiny – is just a dream. But by enacting this dream, by taking on ‘the moving form of the other’s destiny’, the dream of a common destiny gains reality: ‘the stormy movement of love makes true what was only an illusion on the first day’ (1986b: 229).
This does not mean that lovers can heal each other’s wounds. The living of the dream remains bound to images of tragedy and death – as intense erotic life always is, according to Bataille (1986a). He does not specify why that is so, but I shall endeavor to do so on the basis of the elements already provided.
Since communication is based on wounds, not on separate parts which could complement each other, what is experienced in communication is not only individual losses, but the loss of any idea of completeness together. The tragedy of love consists in the paradox that our own incompleteness drives us towards others, but what binds us together with others is exactly this wounded existence we are. Therefore, the most powerful images of love are images of impossibility, longing or death. The connectedness of lovers can only be lived as a drama of loss.
When it comes to collective life (Bataille refers ambiguously to ‘communities’ as well as ‘crowds’), we are faced with myths. In contrast to the dream of lovers which ‘leaves intact everything that surrounds it’, the myth extends to social reality as a whole (1986b: 232). But just like the dream of lovers, the myth is an initial lie which ‘represents destiny and becomes being’ by being lived: ‘Myth is perhaps fable, but this fable is placed in opposition to fiction if one looks at the people who dance it, who act it, and for whom it is living truth’ (1986b: 231–2).
But where do the myths come from? Bataille ascribes the role of myth-creation to ‘secret societies’ and modern ‘sorcerer apprentices’ (1986b: 233). The latter term was intended as a rejoinder to Kojeve, who had characterized members of the Collège de Sociologie as ‘sorcerers’ apprentices’ (Ffrench, 2007: 18–19). Indeed, the Collège (of which Bataille was a founding member, but also a controversial figure whose radical ideas were not shared by all) was dedicated to the furthering of intense communal experience. A year before the creation of the Collège, in 1936, Bataille had inaugurated Acéphale (from Greek: akephalos, ‘headless’), a ritualized secret society.
The obscure concluding remarks of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ seem to imply that radical intellectual groups should invent myths for the broader crowds to live. If this is indeed Bataille’s suggestion, it would bear the connotations of a fascist organization (otherwise identified by Bataille as his prime enemy throughout the 1930s). 6 Why not see myths as emerging through the affective exchanges of collective life as such? As shall be developed below, Bataille’s later writings open for other possible understandings of myth emergence.
In writings of the 1940s to 1950s, Bataille develops and radicalizes the ontology of the individual (1986a, 1998, 1889, 1988). Especially significant I find the rambling, fragmented, yet at times stunningly lucid work Inner Experience. Bataille envisions a fundamental state of flowing energies between particles, the internal relations of which are characterized by continuity rather than difference. Differentiation arises through unstable, semi-open unities of particles constituting ‘me’ as different from ‘you’ and from ‘the whole’. The exact nature of these ‘particles’ and ‘energies’ is, admittedly, somewhat obscure: exchanges may concern body fluids or bacteria as well as words, symbols, laughter, ecstasy or social status (Bataille, 1988: 84–94).
Differentiation is the basis of reification and exploitation. We perceive others as individuals or objects distinctly separated from ourselves, rather than as fragile, porous unities. We objectify ourselves as well. This objectifying mode of experiencing the world inhibits the possibility of communication. The function of sacrifice is to restore the possibility of communication by killing the ‘thinghood’ of oneself and others (Bataille, 1998: 55–61, 1989: 43–8). Although dedicating thorough studies to traditional forms of sacrifice (1998, 1989), Bataille is no less concerned with modern forms of sacrifice which may not be manifested in physical death, but symbolic or emotional death. Drunkenness, erotic exchange, excessive gift-giving, laughter or poetry could all constitute forms of sacrifice.
But if differentiation and objectification inhibit communication, is communication then only possible through the collapse of individuals, objects, social order and discourse? Powerful strands of interpretation (for which Derrida’s readings (particularly 2007: 317–50) have been significant) would indeed suggest that ‘communication’ for Bataille implies an impossible ‘fusion’ of all things. I suggest a different path of interpretation according to which communication, rather than pivoting on fusion, builds on an ever tensional relationship between continuity and difference. As such, it requires not a collapse of discursive distinctions, only a momentary ‘letting go’ of specific discursive meaning, for an experience of the pure energy of discursive potentiality.
Among the numerous memorable metaphors introduced in Inner Experience, there are two I find particularly compelling. Firstly, Bataille speaks of discourse as a gale-heated wind and the possibility of experiencing discourse as a chilled wind exempt from particular statement: ‘in experience […] what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind. […] it is the will, adding itself to discourse, not to be content with what is stated, to oblige one to feel the chill of the wind, to be laid bare’ (1988: 13)
Experiencing a ‘discourse without statement’ does not amount to stopping discourse. Rather, we may understand it as an experience of discourse as such: as energetic movement, tension between fluidity and semi-stable unities; potential rather than particular meaning.
The other metaphor concerns ‘inner experience’ as trans-individual experience: the individual subject transforms into a state similar to ‘the ancient chorus, the witness, the popularizer of the drama […]; as subject, it is thrown outside of itself, beyond itself; it ruins itself in an undefined throng of possible existences’ (1988: 61).
The ‘ancient chorus’ symbolizes for Bataille the explosion of the isolated self into an experience of multiple ‘possible existences’. In light of the former metaphor, we may add that this transgressive experience relies on movement and potentiality, rather than fixed meanings: The multiple ‘possible existences’ imagined by the exploding self should not correspond to objectified alternative existences, but rather to potential life as such.
But how is it possible to overcome objectifications? This is where dramatization enters. Objectifications cannot simply be rolled back. On the contrary, Bataille depicts the path toward ‘inner experience’ as passing through the most extreme of objectifications: sacrifice.
According to Bataille, the sacrificer experiences, in a glimpse (‘an inner flash of light’), her own death as a thing by witnessing the killing of the victim, by projecting herself into the victim whose thinghood is sacrificed. In this glimpse, neither of them appear as isolated beings but as ‘“that which it [existence] is”: the movement of painful communication’ (1988: 118).
For this experience of ontological openness, it is not the event of death itself, but anguish which is crucial, the prolonged fantasy of death (1988: 153, 194, 195). Accordingly, sacrifice need not be realized by means of traditional ritualization. Whatever may awaken the horror of death may constitute a path to sacrifice: eroticism (1986a), intoxication, art (1993), crime stories (1986b: 17–19). Even laughter resembles sacrifice: ‘If a group of people laugh at […] a sentence revealing an absurdity, there passes within them a current of intense communication.’ We ‘sacrifice the one “whom we laugh at”‘, but those who laugh feel the destructive forces of their own laughter, and joy turns into anguish (1988: 95–6, 192).
Following this path of interpretation means opening for an understanding of ‘communication’ as that very tension between continuity and emerging form which captures, for Bataille, our ontological nature. As such, it is only momentarily and painfully accessible since it implies the prolonged experience of one’s own death as an object, through the death of another, for a glimpse of the pure potentiality of transformative form.
II Conceptualizing the mass: Sacrificial structures and exploding communication
On the basis of this interpretation of Bataille’s ontology of the individual and the element of self-dramatization it entails I shall now seek to develop a concept of ‘the mass’ that captures a fundamental kind of human connectedness.
This conceptual development will be based on three reflections. Although these reflections build on my readings in Part I, they should be seen as constituting the steps of an independent construction that extends, transforms, criticizes and ultimately deconstructs the core Bataille concepts interpreted above.
Essential features of sacrifice: Annihilation of thinghood and asymmetry of roles
For Bataille, the culmination of sacrifice implies the extinction of any form of objectification – including fixed myths.
But if we contemplate sacrifice as a temporal occurrence, it becomes clear that sacrifice cannot escape myths. The victim functions as a projection of the sacrificer who experiences the death of the victim as if it were her own death. This in itself implies mythification. Moreover, the sacrificer’s experience of multiple ‘possible existences’ through the death of the victim may, in glimpses, constitute an experience of pure potentiality. However, if we seek to grasp this experience as something that extends in time, it seems inevitable that it will unfold as a flow of particular images of possible existences. Holding on to an experience of ‘pure potentiality’ is practically impossible. But we may grasp the flow of images highly dynamically: The process of image creation could take the form of a continuous rising and falling of particular images; continuous mythification rather than fixed myths.
The asymmetry of roles implied in Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice is noteworthy. Yet, he hardly draws the full consequences thereof. The victim is meant to die (physically or symbolically) while the sacrificer is not. Only the sacrificer gains the fruits of death by prolonging the experience of anguish, communicated from the victim while also projected into it. The ‘painful communication’ at issue concerns, accordingly, primarily the sacrificer who experiences a profound extension, and ultimately explosion, of her own self, an experience of becoming ‘others’: becoming the dying victim, becoming other possible lives. The victim, in turn, is annihilated together with the ‘thinghood’ projected into it.
We may think of the victim in traditional terms as an animal used as a medium for the destruction of thinghood, but whose whole existence is sacrificed with it. Even if sacred at the moment of death, 7 the animal-victim becomes, in a certain sense, garbage. We could also think of an imaginary victim (in a crime story, for instance), but the structure would be the same: the murder encompasses the full (imagined) existence of the victim, not just its reified dimensions. Or we could think of some sort of emotional killing in connection with sexual acts, hitting more than the objectified manifestations (social roles) of the partner, but unfathomable registers as well. Or symbolic killing: forms of language or rationality crystallized into extreme systems of ‘thinghood’ while their broader horizons of experiences and reflections would be sacrificed along with them.
On the basis of this deconstruction, we may clarify the nature of sacrifice as follows. Sacrificial dramatization does not escape mythical objectifications but escalates between glimpses of ‘pure potentiality’ and explosions of mythical images emerging and falling continuously. Moreover, there is a price to pay for this freedom from the objectifications of normal life, namely that something is wasted, treated as garbage – something beyond the ‘thinghood’ meant to be sacrificed.
Inner and outer masses
According to Bataille, a sacrificing individual may gain an ‘inner experience’ of becoming ‘a chorus’, ‘an ‘undefined throng of possible existences’.
I suggest Bataille’s exploration of ‘inner experience’ may open for a bounteous concept of ‘the mass’, highlighting that a mass contains not only outer but also inner characteristics. The sacrificer described by Bataille feels herself as a collective, as an infinite space of possible lives. She loses herself as a distinct ‘I’ and becomes, in an inner sense, a throng, a mass. This ‘inner mass’, however, only arises due to ‘communication’, as Bataille sees it. Communication implies an interesting doubleness. It relies on the fundamental ontological openness of individuals, materially and mentally. Individuals communicate through their holes, wounds. Their incompleteness provides them, potentially, with an extreme degree of sensitivity and receptivity to other lives. On the other hand, communication relies on projection and imagination. Receiving something (words, feelings, bodily gestures) from others never amounts to pure ‘reception’. We project our own imaginations of others into them.
Reception and projection, although seemingly contradictory, appear intimately connected in Bataille’s analyses. Reception of what is ‘not me’ is only possible through projection: I must experience the other as if the other was myself in order to be receptive at all. I must imagine myself in the other. Self-projections are, paradoxically, not just a barrier, but a condition of possibility for openness. Conversely, projections would not be possible without receptivity; projections do not arise from myself in isolation but thrive on the fact that I am a porous, non-closed, semi-stable unity existing in continuous processes of exchange with my surroundings.
On this basis, the ‘inner mass’ which may be experienced through sacrifice, is never purely ‘inner’. It comprises glimpses of other lives that could have been my own; but these imaginations could not have arisen without the existence of others outside me affecting my inner projections. Bataille focuses primarily on the exchanges between sacrificer and victim (and in earlier works on the exchanges between lovers 8 ). I suggest we expand his analyses to masses as follows:
Masses may be grasped as dynamic interplays between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ masses. A mass is not just a huge number of people but involves a special kind of connectedness. As part of a mass, I experience the ‘outer mass’ through my ‘inner mass’, my exploding imaginations of possible lives. But these imaginations are continuously invigorated by the mass around me, just as my ‘inner mass’ affects my surroundings by virtue of the fact that I continuously interact with them. In this sense, we may understand a mass as constituted of numerous ‘inner masses’ communicating with each other, without ever melting together. The outer mass – the fact that multiple individuals stay together – is upheld by these numerous interacting inner masses, just as it functions as a condition for the latter. Importantly, this does not imply that all ‘inner masses’ be equally influential. Communication may be more intense in some parts of the mass than others; powerful formations may possess increased capacities of transmitting images, gestures, words or rhythmic movements far beyond themselves. 9 However, to the extent this would result in a clear hierarchic organization and fixed, rather than ever evolving, imaginations, the phenomenon at issue would no longer be a mass.
According to this conceptualization, the mass is a highly complex phenomenon. What holds it together is twofold: multiple projections influencing each other intensely while never melting together; and a continuous experience of loss which, in turn, sparks the generation of new projections and, possibly, momentary glimpses of ‘pure potentiality’, complete freedom.
The chorus as a metaphor for the mass
The original function of the chorus in the Greek tragedies remains obscure and disputed. Today, it is often ascribed a mainly commentating role, a bridge between actors and audience. Schlegel’s theorization of the chorus as an ‘ideal spectator’ expressing ‘the general sympathy of all mankind’ has been groundbreaking for modern understandings (Schlegel, 1846: 69–70). Contrastingly, I find inspiration in interpretations emphasizing the active role of the chorus: The chorus suffers, interrupts, provides advice, judges, disobeys, moans, pleads, threatens, conspires or seeks revenge (Bacon, 1994; Foley, 2003).
Originally, the chorus alone performed the drama. But even after individual actors stepped in, it constituted a crucial dramatic element: chorus members were meticulously trained in dancing and vocal techniques, wore masks and costumes, impersonated someone they were not (Bacon, 1994: 6–8; Foley, 2003: 5–7). The chorus certainly witnessed the drama but performed it as well.
Bataille introduces the ‘ancient chorus’ in a brief poetic gesture and provides no hints as to the meaning or range of this metaphor. I suggest developing it as a metaphor of ‘the mass’ while building on the elements reflected above. Accordingly, we could envision members of the elites today as characters of modern dramas: individuals somehow incarnating the dominating agendas of today (politicians, experts, civil servants, journalists, business people) and passionately celebrated or opposed by the masses. In today’s political dramas such individuals are either providers of sacrificial victims or symbolically sacrificed themselves. The masses are, in other words, like the chorus: witnessing and performing sacrificial dramas.
But what exactly is sacrificed? Political leaders are no longer guillotined. I suggest that what is sacrificed is, most fundamentally, social categories (or roles) by which humans are evaluated and reified. Elites may be perceived as incarnations of such systems of categorization. Or elites may point to someone or something else as sources thereof. The crucial point is that whoever or whatever is given the role as victim (particular groups, institutions or laws), the sacrificial drama concerns fundamentally the masses themselves. The masses sacrifice their own ‘thinghood’, the social categories and roles imprisoning their lives, incarnated by particular individuals or symbolic elements. Hereby, they perform their own drama of destiny.
Also, the transgressive nature of the ancient chorus may provide elements for a ‘mass’ conceptualization. The chorus comprises excluded and conventional insights; official and unofficial knowledge; conservative and transgressive behaviour; private and public, female and masculine perspectives; misunderstandings and historical wisdom. It brings myth and religion into the core of political life and paints the present with colors of mourning. (Foley, 2003: 20–23)
The mass could be qualified in similar terms: it springs from a particular historical situation yet transgresses established roles. Wisdom and stupidity, groundbreaking visions and conventional clichés, hopes and fears all boil together. In the midst of such vast imageries death and mourning play significant parts. Only by sacrificing parts of itself does the mass truly become a mass.
III The spectrum of masses: Contemporary examples of mass movements
The mass-conceptualization developed above implies the following core features: The mass depends on sacrifice. What is sacrificed is, most fundamentally, the ‘thinghood’ of those individuals comprising the mass: social categories or roles by which they are objectified. However, sacrificial gestures tear down more than just ‘thinghood’ and reduce certain aspects of life to garbage. The mass exists in the tension between an explosion of particular mythic images and glimpses of pure potentiality. Multiple ‘inner masses’ affect each other, hereby sustaining the outer mass which, in turn, feeds the inner masses. Dramatization is essential for potentiality to be released. Objectified positions imprisoning individuals cannot simply be rolled back but must be symbolically destroyed. The gigantic centrifuge of destruction which the mass is comprises, however, the whole range of human expression, from hidden insights and utopian hopes to aggressive stupidity.
Since the mass depends on continuous processes of destruction and production of ever new figurations of ‘thinghood’, it exists in the border zone between stabilized mythological figurations and complete openness to new form. The former tendency draws it towards totalitarianism – specific mythic figurations of ‘the society’, ‘the enemy’ or ‘the good life’ having captured the mass as a whole. The latter tendency is what gives the mass its emancipatory potentials, its capacities for developing liberating forms of social interaction, transcending imprisoning categories and roles.
Accordingly, if we grasp this border zone as a spectrum, we may differentiate between different kinds of masses. Masses gravitate towards totalitarianism – and loose capacities for transformative imagination – when: sacrificial gestures tend to attack vast aspects of pulsating life rather than reifications; myth production becomes stabilized, resulting in claimed ‘identities’; the mass develops hierarchical structures. With this spectrum in mind, let us look at some examples.
Masses bordering on totalitarianism
In recent years, the increase of broad protests against ‘established politics’ has both shocked and bewildered believers in liberal democracy. Popular support for European right-wing nationalism and Trump’s election in 2016 (and continuous capability of mobilizing masses of voters) belong to the most discussed phenomena. ‘Anti-globalization’, ‘anti-immigration’, ‘anti-expert-dominance’ constitute common emblematic features. Their ‘anti’-positioning is, however, often expressed as a striking vitalism, a triumphing ‘taking the political back’ – and confirmation of life expressions which do not conform to what is considered ‘rational’ or ‘correct’ among contemporary liberals. 10
Looking at such movements through the prism of sacrifice, it is not hard to identify the victims: immigrants, black people, experts, bureaucrats, journalists or medias, the established political system, including its democratic institutions. Sacrifices are largely symbolic, but with material implications for individual lives (such as immigrant lives) or lifeforms (scientific, journalistic, critical or democratic lifeforms). What is sacrificed is not just the ‘thinghood’ of individuals – social categories and hierarchies – but also the opposite: lives struggling within such structures. Rather than destroying imprisoning forms of categorization, the sacrifices in question tend to enforce them.
Yet, these phenomena are not unambiguous. The elite sacrifices in question may indeed be seen as uproar against particular objectifications under which the protesters suffer. In the case of the Trump movement, the role of patronization is noticeable, famously crystallized in Hilary Clinton’s expression from 2016: ‘basket of deplorables’ – hinting at ‘racists, sexists, homophobes and xenophobes’. Such stigmatizing emblems reach far back, of course. But a particular newer manifestation of this stigmatization seems to have emerged since the early Obama years: questions associated with ‘identity politics’ have, increasingly, given rise to polarization and hateful shaming from both sides. Those who came to be associated with phobias against particular groups were identified not only as morally detestable but as stupid, uneducated and backward-looking. (Murphy, 2018; Klein, 2020). Particular cultural and political elites have become the very incarnations of the multifaceted developments by which many Americans feel trapped in despised roles. When sacrificing elites, they sacrifice, indeed, such despised social roles – along with the forms of rationality and ‘correctness’ that feed contempt.
As for the tension between particular images and pure potentiality, it is clear that anti-establishment right-wing populism relies on partly stabilized image production – resulting in mythic images of ‘the nation’, ‘leadership’, ‘ordinary life’ in contrast to the lives of elites, foreigners or left-wing ‘progressives’. These images hover between articulation and implicit, subconscious existence; they require no clear reference, not to mention consistency. As partly stabilized, this image production blocks the experience of potentiality. Moreover, it situates the experience of loss in the figure of the victim, rather than in the sacrificing masses themselves. In other words, the sacrificing masses tend to associate themselves with particular identities rather than experiencing their own ontological incompleteness – which in turn would open for the potentialities of life.
Finally, hierarchical features – a leader figure and elaborate party/campaign apparatuses – are obvious, in the Trump movement as in other right-wing movements. The leader largely ‘delivers’ the victims to be sacrificed. Yet, also here ambiguities are noticeable. Particular articulations from the leader may direct sacrificial energies univocally – as when Trump in 2020 post-election battles accused the US electoral system of fraud. However, as indicated above, Trump did not create the vast sacrificial energies directed towards elites. He was, like other right-wing-leaders, capable of interacting with the mythic imagery of masses – partly by stabilizing image production, partly by not shutting off completely the vast boiling centrifuge of images.
Transformative masses
At the other end of the spectrum we find mass movements like Occupy Wall Street denying leadership as well as unequivocal political demands. OWS constituted one of the most spectacular social movements in US history since the Second World War. The famous occupation of Zuccotti Park, close to Wall Street in New York, in autumn 2011 came to mark the beginning of a national, and soon global, Occupy movement. Zuccotti Park remained occupied for a couple of months until it was cleared by the police – a coordinated action at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police (OWS was seen as a potential terrorist threat). 11 The Occupy-movement gave rise to controversial and intensely debated activities in numerous cities; but the occupation of Zuccotti Park is arguably the most iconic. It engendered a vast amount of source material and inspired activists as well as intellectuals immensely in the following years.
OWS was vibrant with collective visions, manifested in speeches, rituals, ways of living together in the streets – all of which resonated to a vast mythic imagery revolving around the idea of creating, together, new forms of collective life. Indeed, it was the explicit intension of the movement to enforce potentiality and avoid stabilization. The attempts to fulfill this intension gave the movement its remarkable characteristics:
Firstly, OWS rejected leadership, hierarchical organization and representative democracy. Although the movement was initiated by particular individuals and groups, it soon comprised a range of independent groups which all shared the ideal of creating a space of horizontal political influence. Decisions were made on the basis of (modified) consensus, following debates run by ‘facilitators’, not leaders (Gitlin, 2012: 80–104; Harcourt, 2013: 47).
Secondly, OWS refused to formulate concrete political demands. The overall goals were fairly clear: ending economic inequality as well as Wall Street (financial sector) influence on politics; creating a true democracy without the limitations of present representative democracy. Concrete political demands would, however, have amounted to subjugation to the present rules of politics, according to the movement (Gitlin, 2012: 105–12; Harcourt, 2013: 47–50).
Finally, the Zuccotti Park camp itself was seen as the realization of a political goal. Camp life was meant to recreate the conditions of collective life (based on direct democracy and non-capitalist logics of organization) (Graeber, 2013: 38; Feigenbaum et al., 2013: 41–68).
Yet, in spite of these attempts of letting dynamic, open-ended collective political action dominate over stabilized images of politics, stabilization unavoidably sneaked in. Facilitation of continuous horizontal decision-making requires organizational measures. OWS invented its very own measures such as: ‘the progressive stack’ (allowing minorities and women to speak before others); hand signals rather than verbal expressions of consent or dissent (securing respect for speakers); and ‘the human mike’ (creating empathy and solidarity with the speaker through everyone’s repetition of the speaker’s words) (Gitlin, 2012: 73–99). Although of a processual nature such rituals obviously work to stabilize image production: they build, in part, on explicitly or implicitly assumed identities (‘women’, ‘minorities’, a ‘solidary collective’, a ‘consensus-seeking collective’). Likewise, the recreation of collective life happening in the camp depended on a number of working groups respectively taking care of food provision, library, legal help, media contacts, independent media activities and more. (Writers for the 99%, 2011: 61–96). Although undoubtedly building new forms of social relations and solidarity, the existence of pre-established categories of societal organization are quite visible.
Stabilization of image production through ritualization, processual measures and work differentiation is not necessarily problematic in light of ideals of potentiality and transformative life. Stabilization in certain dimensions may create conditions of free creation in others. Moreover, what can be dreamed collectively in brief moments of euphoric connectedness is one thing; what can be lived collectively over months is another. Arguably, more problematic for OWS were the informal kinds of leadership and hierarchies that, unsurprisingly, emerged. ‘Facilitators’ easily become guards. The various work groups were, unavoidably, powerholders. Activist ideas arose not evenly from all. The movement soon became criticized for its professional activists pursuing their goals of horizontal, transformative, open-ended politics (Harcourt, 2013: 58–9). Paradoxically, the movement showed that when potentiality becomes an explicit goal, it is at risk of becoming a caricature, hiding its own institutionalization.
But how may we grasp the movement’s sacrificial gestures? What was sought to be sacrificed was arguably vast political-economic logics associated with capitalism and parliamentary democracy. Banners and posters testified creatively to the fact that the activist would indeed associate herself intimately with the logics to be sacrificed: ‘Lost my job, but found an occupation’; ‘You must be asleep to experience the American dream’; ‘Lick my Goldman Sacks’ (quoted in Taussig, 2013). These slogans play on double meanings while reversing established logics in sacrificial gestures. The first slogan points to the violence involved in ‘jobs’ (which are like ‘occupations’) and reverses the logic of this violence in the Occupy movement. The second points to the dogmatism (‘sleep’) involved in the ‘American dream’, the sacrifice of which opens for another kind of awoken dreaming. And the third profanes what has been worshipped (‘Goldman Sacks’) while projecting the activist’s own body (ass) into this profaned object, showing that what needs to be sacrificed is indeed a part of the activist herself. Also the movement’s prime slogan, ‘We are the 99%’, displays an interesting reversed logic in the light of sacrifice: it excludes someone from being part of the movement (the 1% top earners); it sacrifices the 1% for the equality of the 99% – a reversal of present conditions. The slogan can be read as pointing to the absurdity of any situation of inequality. But it also points to the garbage involved in sacrifice. Even if the 1% is only sacrificed as top earners, as incarnations of structures of inequality, not as ‘whole persons’, it still means the exclusion of life forms, dreams and experiences.
In spite of the paradoxical features and forms of self-denial hinted at above, OWS is still a striking example of self-dramatizing, transformative masses. After the crack-downs (in New York and other cities), the Occupy movement sought to revive itself but never experienced a similar momentum. Reasons may be multiple. However, the ‘living’ of transformative political life over time seems to incorporate severe complexities – which became clear already in the two-month period of the Zuccotti Park occupation.
Masses of the future: Caught between transformation and stabilization?
The two examples above were meant to illustrate the complexities of the spectrum between totalitarianism and emancipation. Although I located the movements at their end of the spectrum, I have sought to underline ambiguities as well. Arguably, all masses are structurally caught in ‘the border zone’; no masses are univocally emancipatory or totalitarian.
Let me briefly indicate how one of the most significant social movements in 2020 may be analyzed through the prism of sacrifice. Black Lives Matter – whose declared mission is ‘to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes’ 12 – has existed since 2013 but experienced a forceful global mobilization in the summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. Peaceful demonstrations, along with violent riots, engaged masses of people and served to polarize national populations across the globe. The movement is still vibrant and likely to remain a significant political player in the coming years. Although many find its articulations too radical, it has managed to establish post-colonial justice as an inescapable political issue of the present, also for ‘established politicians’. Even those who do not prioritize issues of post-colonialism and racism can no longer avoid relating to them.
One could hardly find a more striking example of sacrificial energy than this movement. One of its central – and controversial – forms of activism has concerned symbolic expressions of past colonialism, like the names of statues, streets or institutions. When statues of slave traders or colonial rulers are being toppled, beheaded, spray-painted, burned or thrown into the harbour, it may be interpreted as powerful manifestations of sacrifice: ritualized killing of objectifications – discriminating social roles – which the protesters feel they cannot escape in a post-colonial era. They sacrifice the perpetrators of the past that incarnate the injustice of the present. The symbolic victim is, at once, the enemy and the incarnation of the ‘thinghood’ of the sacrificers themselves, the social roles imprisoning them. Indeed, the enormous resonance within the movement of George Floyd’s last words, ‘I can’t breathe’, may be seen in the light of such imprisoning roles: Black lives are lives that cannot breathe – if not killed, they are trapped in suffocating reifications.
Ambiguities begin, however, when it comes to the status of the identities involved. Is ‘blackness’ a category of liberation or suppression? It appears to be both. Clearly, the uproar against the dominating, repressive social categories of ‘blackness’ does not imply a wish for the extinction of any category of blackness. On the contrary, ‘blackness’ as an identity is enforced (the webpage speaks of ‘black power’, ‘black imagination’ and ‘black joy’). 13 It is, however, unclear whether the enforcement of ‘blackness’ would be crucial at all times, or only in times of battle. Could there be a future in which we could transcend such identities all together?
Such complexities – which arguably inhabit all kinds of identity politics – constitute yet another manifestation of the intricacies of the ‘border zones’ of masses: tensions between stabilization and transformation, between fixed images and ever exploding visions of possible lives. Black Lives Matter is, unquestionably, dedicated to transformation and potentiality. Yet, the transformative energy of ‘black lives’ is accompanied by a stabilized figuration: that of the historical power of ‘whiteness’ versus ‘blackness’.
IV Is this what democracy needs?
Mass phenomena have been feared not only by thinkers devoted to individualism but by dedicated collectivity thinkers as well. Tocqueville, Durkheim and Arendt found – from each their own standpoint – masses to represent societal monstrosity. Instead, they advocated a pluralist structure based on well defined collective entities, corresponding to particular societal groups, needs and functions. The liberalist vision of Tocqueville (1994) relied on a free civil society; Durkheim (1992) envisioned a system of large corporations (a modern version of guilds) responsible for the moral and practical government of industries and occupational fields; Arendt (1972) saw herself as a council theorist. Similar ideas can be found in the British pluralist tradition, in particular in ‘guild socialism’ blossoming after the end of the Second World War (see Cole, 2017), or in continental variations of council democracy (Gorter et al., 2007). As visions of comprehensive societal change these ideas lost power throughout the 20th century, but they thrived in modified forms in co-operative movements, social insurance associations, unions, free schools and other organized entities of what came to be known as ‘civil society’.
Such collective visions offer practical solutions corresponding to the concerns of various social groups. As such, their advantages over masses are crystal clear. Yet, their limitations are as well. They build on established social categories inhibiting capacities for continuous structural transformation. The general weight on functional roles may leave misfits and escapists homeless.
Among contemporary political philosophers, the weaknesses of traditional collective entities are taken into account. By advocating more dynamic forms of collectivity, philosophers such as Butler, Negri and Hardt hope to counter problems of hierarchies, exclusions, dogmatism, fixed identities.
The ‘multitude’, as envisioned by Hardt and Negri, is rooted in present structures of capitalism: it encompasses vast technological, scientific, organizational, social and creative capabilities which, released from capitalist exploitation, could form the basis of a different social order. This change would require dynamic self-organization of the multitude through volatile ‘assemblages’ and ‘intersections’ between them (Hardt and Negri, 2011: 165–78, 340–60).
Butler battles insistently the imprisoning identities we performatively (re)produce and hopes for precarious people across identities to come together in ‘assemblies’ or ‘alliances’. Identities should not be abandoned but recreated. Public recognition for a diversity of identities constitutes an important political goal (Butler, 2015: 66–98, 154–92).
It is hardly coincidental that Butler, Negri and Hardt avoid the concept of the ‘mass’. Their visions are clearly distinguishable from dominant modern understandings of ‘masses’ as emotional, passive, potentially dangerous, unorganized and manipulable (Negri, 2002). Arguably, they are distinguishable, as well, from the mass conceptualization developed in this article.
Surely, ‘the multitude’ and ‘precarious crowds’ share some important characteristics with ‘masses’ as I understand them: internal and external openness, multiplicity, changeability. Yet, Negri, Hardt and Butler still build on categorizations and identities, only as fluent, transformable. Even if collective entities are seen as ‘assemblages’ rather than unified entities, collective political action is still meant to bring together various groups which carry certain characteristics (feminists, students, environmentalists, veterans, local community groups). This could hardly be otherwise: All three thinkers focus on the collective action as productive, constructive (Hardt and Negri, 2011: 39–55; Butler, 2015: 77–89); 14 and this focus requires a starting point (already existing groups, capabilities, practices) which can then be dynamically refigured.
In contrast, the ‘mass’ as I see it is ultimately based on an ontology of loss. Harshly put: the connectedness of the mass is not based on what it can do (although it may do a lot), but on a common condition of incompleteness, lack of content – which in turn may spark enormous imaginative power when dramatized collectively.
Let me emphasize that democracy today strongly needs a plurality of collective entities – traditional and fluid. But ‘the mass’ implies something crucial which should not be ignored: a fundamental kind of connectedness – potentially transgressing social distinctions – which, in an era of mass democracies, may induce hope.
Masses are not just audiences, the reactions of which political elites may fear, seek to please or influence. They are spaces of potentiality in which that which cannot be expressed in present society unfolds as multiple fragile images. This potentiality cannot be immediately translated or represented. Yet, it marks those who give themselves to the masses, opens them for change. Intense manifestations of mass phenomena signify that diffuse dreams of fundamental change are shivering throughout society. Even if unusable for immediate practical purposes, this poetry of masses should not be discarded. It is a force of democracy: a force of fundamental connectedness and utopian openness.
V Postludium: The most advanced actors on the stages of democracy
When Arendt in her grand work on totalitarianism diagnosed masses as consisting of atomized, lonely individuals with ‘nothing in common’ (1994: 311–15), she was right. The mass conceptualization developed above builds in fact on lonely, wounded individuals, depleted of substantial content. But in contrast to Arendt I find a kind of connectedness exactly in this lack of content: in the desire that drives individuals towards others and makes them project themselves into others and others into themselves; and in the continuous experience of loss as far as these projections are concerned, which in turn can work as an incredible machinery of imagination. In a sense they share nothing; yet, they owe everything that explodes in them to each other.
The sacrificial structure of ‘the mass’ implies great dangers. Sacrificial gestures tear down more than just ‘thinghood’ and reduce aspects of life to garbage. Dangers are, however, primarily triggered when particular asymmetries are reified and stabilized. This is what happens in masses bordering on totalitarianism: The ‘thinghood’ of the victim tends to be restored rather than sacrificed, and the mass as a whole stiffens into hierarchies and fixed myths.
The problem is that these dangers belong to the structural features of the mass. The mass is, due to the tensions on which it feeds, a powerful force of democracy, yet no less a threat to the same.
So what determines whether the silent storm of potentiality becomes a roar of mythic reification, or not? I shall leave that open and simply draw attention to this subtle statement by Malabou: ‘democracy is the aristocratic secret of the mass’ (2015: 26) 15 – and turn it around: the mass is the aristocratic secret of democracy. Whenever masses realize the true potentials of sacrifice – dramatizing ontological conditions of openness; escaping fixations of social categorization – they constitute the most advanced actors on the stages of democracy.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.