Mass and power

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Mass and Power is the main philosophical work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti , published in 1960 . In it he analyzes and describes the unleashing of man in the crowd and the rule of sociopathic rulers over crowds.

History of origin

Canetti's access to mass phenomena was his own formative mass experiences, after which he wanted to fathom what the mass is. On the basis of personal experience, Canetti came up with the idea that there is a mass drive in humans that is in conflict with the personality drive. Looking back, he remembers in his life story: “That something forces people to become masses seemed obvious and irrefutable to me, that the masses disintegrated into individuals, had no less evidence, just as that these individuals wanted to become masses again. [...] But what the mass itself really was, I didn't know, it was a riddle that I resolved to solve. "

The genesis of mass and power begins in 1922 at the beginning of the Weimar Republic . On the occasion of a demonstration march after the murder of the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau , the young Elias Canetti had his first mass experience. A year later, the humiliating experiences of inflation are even more formative , of which he writes in retrospect in mass and power : “Inflation is a mass phenomenon in the truest and narrowest sense of the word. [...] In this process there is again that quality which I have described as particularly important and striking: the pleasure in rapid and unlimited growth. But this growth has turned negative. "

To be carried away by a development against one's will - this feeling returned to Canetti in person four years later in Vienna . During the workers' uprising on July 15, 1927 ( Vienna Justice Palace fire ), he was swept away by the stream of demonstrators as a bystander. Decades later, he recalled that uprising as follows: “It was 53 years ago, and the excitement of that day is still in my bones. I became part of the crowd, I was completely absorbed in it, I didn't feel the slightest resistance to what it was doing. ”After Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany and Hitler's invasion of Vienna, Canetti fled into exile in London. He imposed a ban on further writing and devoted himself entirely to his work on mass and power . It took ten years to study the sources, and it was not until 1948 that he began to write. Another eleven years passed before Canetti completed Mass and Power in 1959 and published it in 1960.

Mass and power is not only Canetti's main work, it was his obsession, on which he worked for over twenty years. It is situated between anthropology , social psychiatry , sociology , ethnology , philosophy and the transmission of myths . Canetti avoids the concept of classical mass psychology coined by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud and also does not share their negative approaches. The regression of the mind to the level of savages (Le Bon) presented by Le Bon and Freud is not an argument against the masses for Canetti, but a means of knowledge with which he opened up a further access to the masses based on individual myths of primitive peoples. Entering a crowd frees the individual from his ego boundaries and leads to a state that Canetti understands as an anthropological drive. For Canetti, Freud's psychoanalytic analysis of mass phenomena is completely inadequate, since he does not distinguish between spontaneous mass movements and hierarchically structured groups. Canetti also does not see the libido attachment to the Führer, emphasized by Freud, as a sufficient explanation for authoritarian rule structures.

Mass and power provide a special, sensitive consideration of collective processes and structures of rule. This work provides illuminating insights, especially in the pictorial translations of the mass phenomena and the leadership that dominates them. Canetti, who hates ideologies , does not openly share his worldview. The mature reader must gain knowledge himself. Just as Canetti approaches the masses again and again, this work has to be opened up again and again.

Dimensions

The book begins with the assertion: “There is nothing man fears more than being touched by the unknown. [...] It is the mass alone in which a person can be released from his fear of touch . ” Not only empathy characterizes people, but also the fear of touching other people. If the person was in public, accidental contact with other people required an apology. If the person is in the elevator, he push himself into a corner so as not to come into contact with the others. And locking up in the houses is nothing more than an attempt by people to evade the threatening stranger in the world.

Only in the crowd , this structure guided by “affects”, do people lose their fear of being touched and, in extreme situations, even their fear of death. In the crowd there could be a state of “discharge”, a moment when everyone “gets rid of their differences and feels the same”. The loss of every individuality is seen as a liberating act, since the individual is no longer alone in facing the chaotic world. Now that everyone feels the same, the fear of the stranger within the crowd has been lifted, but the crowd is all the more aware of the different nature of the world outside. The different endangers the “survival” of the crowd, since it shows alternatives to the state of equality . And so the most noticeable characteristic of a mass is the “addiction to destruction”. To ensure her own survival, she wants to destroy the other.

Diverse mass phenomena

Elias Canetti names four general properties of a mass in mass and power :

  1. The crowd always wants to grow.
  2. There is equality within the crowd.
  3. The crowd loves density.
  4. The crowd needs a direction.

The mass in itself does not exist. Masses are either “hunting or escape masses” associated with death threats or life-affirming, euphoric “festival masses”. The masses flee from external dangers as an “escape mass” or, for example, as a “reverse mass” rises in a revolutionary way against existing oppression. Crowds are diverse and not always real. In “Doppelmassen”, for example, women face powerlessly against men, young people against old people or even the living amongst the masses of the dead. You don't want to belong to the dead. They are honored and appeased, they are called for help, fear of their revenge or, if necessary, triumphs over death and the mass of the dead with each new day of life. Canetti extends his investigation of the mass in the course of mass and power to imaginary “collective phenomena that evoke mass sensations in people”. Canetti calls these phenomena, which can trigger pleasurable as well as repulsive feelings of power and powerlessness, “mass symbols”. Among these symbols he counts phenomena in nature that are fascinating for humans, such as fire (from sparks to flames to inferno), water (from drops to rain to the river and sea) or forest (from branches to bushes and trees to the jungle), but also social phenomena, such as art (from cult or art objects to collections to art treasures) or money (from coins to savings to monetary treasures). Specific mass symbols can also be found in the individual nations . For Canetti, a nation is not defined by its language , its territory, its culture or its history . Rather, Canetti sees a nation as a religion . The ideas and feelings that a nation has of itself have penetrated into deeper levels of consciousness as mass symbols. A mass symbol of the Germans was the army for Canetti until his total defeat in World War II. "But the army was more than the army: it was the marching forest ."

In contrast to Freud's and Le Bon's analyzes, the mass in Canetti does not need a guide. If a ruler still binds a mass to himself, the libido bond to the leader is not the primary reason for their cohesion, according to Canetti, but a “phenomenon that first emerged from the emergence of the mass.” The “positive” bond to the ruler through hypnosis or libido Canetti opposes a “negative” bond: the death threat.

Power

Crowd and Power is also a book on fascism and the leadership cult associated with it, although Canetti avoids these terms. Canetti does not want to explain National Socialism as a breach of civilization, he wants to uncover elementary power structures in totalitarian systems. For him, the person of Hitler is not a unique phenomenon , but just one type among others.

In totalitarian systems, power is concentrated in the hands of the ruler. For Canetti, power is a code for violence. So he writes in mass and power that power reveals itself in its archaic moment as a “moment of survival”, whenever a living person triumphantly confronts a dead person.

Having power means survival. The right to decide about life and death is consequently the safest instrument for maintaining power and life. According to Canetti, this instrument of terror now comes along as a right in totalitarian systems and gives the dictator the appearance of a god-like appearance.

But a dictator is not a god . Instead, Canetti defines him as a paranoid ruler. The maintenance of his power is most important to him and at the same time the permanent feeling of threat is present in him. The paranoid ruler can only keep the bulk of his subjects under control by making excessive decisions about their lives and deaths. “His safest, one might say his most perfect subjects are those who died for him” - whether in war , in show trials or in extermination camps .

The power of commands

The rule of a ruler is expressed in his commands . And, as Canetti sees it, man is not only “used to commands from an early age, they are largely made up of what is called education ; They also permeate all adult life, whether it is about the spheres of work , struggle or faith ”. Canetti, who as an adult was never able to completely free himself from his mother's authoritarian power , sees in command and its execution the natural constant of behavior - for Canetti the command is something fundamental, something that is older than language . If an order is given and understood, the action that follows it is perceived as strange by the agent. It was imposed on him. The doer feels the power that lies in the command. For Canetti, power in a figurative, all-encompassing sense also means being able to decide about life and death . In every order there is therefore an anthropologically justified original death threat . Totalitarian power systems are based on the law of the strongest and reversals are so difficult because the execution of a command is fundamentally anchored in human behavior. But what makes an order so irrevocable?

In order to understand how people depend on the command, Canetti breaks down the command into a “drive and a spike”. The drive, the fear of punishment , compels people to carry out the command. After that, a command sting remains inside the person as a "foreign body". In this painful sting the memory of the order given from outside is preserved. Since the spines are foreign bodies, people strive to dissolve them . The dissolution of a sting can only be brought about by reversing the original command situation, if the command recipient passes on the same command as the command generator. A spiral of power that continues to pull down until the ultimate victim , who has no one left to pass the command on. The recipient of the command can only avoid the violations of the command sting if he passes on the associated order directly or completes it, converts it into the required deed , such as B. an archer shoots the arrow as instructed and hits the commanded target.

Unresolved command stings can lead to pathogenic self-denial and mental illness: “It is known that people who act under orders are capable of the most terrible deeds. If the source of the command is buried and you force them to look back on their actions, they do not recognize themselves ”. In other words, if the ruler is dead, the masses have only collective self-denial. Less dramatic, but just as momentous for the psyche and health of the individual concerned, are injuries caused by "indissoluble command sting" z. B. add up or even multiply in the case of externally determined work and other ordered actions.

expenditure

literature

  • Johann P. Arnason, David Roberts (Eds.): Elias Canetti's Counter-Image of Society: Crowds, Power, Transformation. Camden House, New York 2004, ISBN 1-57113-160-4 .
  • Penka Angelova: Elias Canetti - Traces of Mythical Thinking. Paul Zsolnay Verlag 2005, ISBN 978-3-552-05327-4 .
  • Dagmar Barnouw: Anthropological Fantasy: Canetti and Freud on the phenomenon of the mass. In: Canetti's Mass and Power or the Abandonment of Present Thinking, ed. v. John Pattillo-Hess, Vienna 1988, pp. 37-51.
  • Manfred Durzak (Ed.): Mass, power and death in the work of Elias Canettis. In: On Elias Canetti , pp. 72–91.
  • Elias Canetti: The torch in your ear. Life story 1921-1931. Hanser, Munich 1993.
  • Peter Friedrich: The rebellion of the masses in the text system. The language of counter science in Elias Canetti's “Mass and Power”. Munich 1999.
  • Georgiev, Plamen: Elias Canetti's work "MuM". A reflection of humanism and philosophical intention . In: Pattillo-Hess, John, ed. Canettis MuM or the task of contemporary thinking, Bundesverlag, Vienna 1988.
  • Sven Hanuschek: Elias Canetti. Biography . Munich 2005.
  • Francisco Budi Hardiman: The rule of equals. Mass and totalitarian rule. A critical review of the texts by Georg Simmel, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti and Hannah Arendt. Frankfurt / M. [u. a.] 2001.
  • Petra Kuhnau: Quantity and Power in History. On the conception of anthropological constants in Elias Canetti's work Mass and Power. Wuerzburg 1996.
  • Gerhard Melzer: The only sentence and its owner. Attempt on the symbolic ruler Elias Canetti. In: Expert of Power. Elias Canetti, ed. v. Kurt Bartsch u. Gerhard Melzer, Graz 1985, pp. 58-72.
  • Pattillo-Hess, John (ed.): See Georgiev or Piel
  • Edgar Piel: You cannot live in the housing of bondage. Canetti's “Mass and Power”: Science or Myth? In: Canetti's Mass and Power or the Abandonment of Present Thinking, ed. v. John Pattillo-Hess, Vienna: Bundesverlag, 1988, pp. 52–65.
  • Schmid-Bortenschlager, Sigrid: The individual and his mass. Mass theory and literary conception with Elias Canetti and Herm. Broch. In: Bartsch, Kurt, u. a. (Ed.): Expert in power. Elias Canetti , Graz 1985.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Canetti: The torch in the ear. Life story 1921-1931. 1993, pp. 79-80.
  2. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. 1960, p. 214.
  3. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power 1960, p. 217.
  4. ↑ Canetti: The torch in the ear. Life story 1921-1931. 1993, p. 231.
  5. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. 1960, pp. 13-14.
  6. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. 29th edition 2003 (first 1960), pp. 86–87.
  7. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. 29th edition 2003 (first 1960), p. 202.
  8. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. Fischer Taschenbuch 1980, p. 335.
  9. ↑ Canetti: Mass and Power. Fischer Taschenbuch 1980, p. 369.