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22—i n t r o du c i n g t h e m asses
Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I.’ Embarking on his revision of Freud’s theory, the twenty-year-old Canetti was to replace Freud’s sexual drive with what he calls the Massentrieb, or “crowd instinct.” Freud and Le Bon had been blind, he believed. Neither thinker had known the crowd from the inside. As for Canetti, “I had never forgotten how gladly one falls prey to the crowd. . . . I saw crowds around me, but I also saw crowds within me.”60 Yet Canetti’s intention to represent the crowd from within, as an experiential phenomenon, is called into question by his account of his own intellectual procedure. “I had made up my mind,” he writes, to “have the crowd before me as a pure, untouched mountain, which I would be the first to climb without prejudices.”61 Canetti here figurally repeats the mental operation of his adversaries, Le Bon and Freud, because his descriptions betray that his theory, too, presupposes a radical separation of the rational mind from the passionate masses. Interestingly, Canetti states that it was during these days of hard discipline, divided between Freud’s mass psychology and solitary mountain hikes, that he became a true individual: “During those days I also won my independence as a person.”62 Quite literally, Canetti gains mastery as an individual by intellectually conquering the masses. Canetti’s passage shows how his first attempts to analyze the crowd were predetermined by a certain conceptual structure that is characteristic of mainstream mass psychology from its inception in the 1890s and through the 1920s. As a consequence, the crowd comes across less as a transparently described actuality than as a reflection of the conceptual limitations that govern the analysis. A first limitation is obvious enough to go unnoticed: mass psychology presupposes a radical distanciation from its object. Cannetti fantasizes having the masses before him as an untouched mountain. Le Bon and the French mass psychologists regularly described the masses as a remote people, if not as a savage tribe. Canetti’s example also reveals a second conceptual limitation, typical of most writings on the mass: the mass was always constituted in opposition to a notion of individual reason. Consider the following statement of Le Bon: “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”63 Le Bon asserted that the individual is related to the crowd as conscious activity is related to unconscious action. The precondition of such a characterization is the Cartesian concept of the individual as defined by consciousness. For Descartes, the opposite of consciousness was the passions.64