Elias Canetti and the counter-image of resistance

Abstract

The attempt by Arnason and Roberts to interpret Canetti’s work in the context of social theory is taken here as the point of departure to investigate Canetti’s view on the phenomenon of resistance. Resistance is explored in the context of Canetti’s reflection on power and transformation. Further, it is argued that through his substantive concern for crowds (but also for packs, or small bands), an epistemological challenge emerges for social theory. Canetti gives us some precious insights on phenomena of ambiguous multiplicity, which are neither simple sums of separate individuals nor an ontologized Durkheimian collective. Not only this, he resolutely ventures towards the contingency at the foundation of social order, the ‘just-thisness' of power, revealing its non-symbolic basis in gestures that impart affects. It is at this level that resistance can be best understood as a movement of liberation from the grip of power.

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

“…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 bookthe 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.…”

“…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(Canetti, [1960).…”

From ‘the people’ to the crowd: The push for independence in Catalonia

“…More problematically, any understanding of the crowd as crowd is conspicuously absent from their conception of crowd-enabled action, which is simply seen to emerge from the sum of (networked) individual actors. 6 The realm of crowds is neither that of a reified collective entity such as 'the people', however ambiguously defined, nor that of atomized individuals brought together by technological networks, but one that possesses its own specificity, which can perhaps best be described as that of an ambiguous multiplicity (Brighenti, 2011). Moreover, while the mass -a phenomenon produced and daily reproduced out of individuating efforts and sociating impulses -can certainly be approached as the individual's nightmare (Bauman, 2001: 108), it provides a refuge from individuality, even if only a temporary one.…”

“…3. In spite of this, Canetti's Crowds and Power has been the object of some rich sociological interpretations including, among the most illuminating accounts, Arnason (1996), Arnason and Roberts (2004) and Brighenti (2010Brighenti ( , 2011Brighenti ( , 2016. For a discussion of Canetti's 'double estrangement' from the sociological tradition as 'an outsider's heterodox response to a halfestablished heterodoxy' see Arnason (1996: 87).…”

The crowd in the Occupy movement

“…Modern crowds were considered as irrational and as a permanent threat to European culture or the enlightened nation; they were the signs of a culturally regressive modern society and would eventually facilitate the totalitarian mania, taking violent forms in twentieth-century Europe (Borch 2006). Elias Canetti is the first author who introduces a notion of crowds that is not so negatively charged; on the contrary, crowds, according to Canetti, have the potential of liberating people from suffocating power structures (Borch 2009;Brighenti 2011;McClelland 1989). For Canetti (1984, 324), the crowd is characterized by a moment of discharge when its members pack together, body to body, and feel equal.…”