Adorno asks Canetti

Canetti, Elias + Theodor Adorno: Crowds and Power: Adorno asks Canetti about the close relationship between crowds and
power, survival and self-preservation, and his idea of the "invisible
crowd." Adorno begins by commenting that Canetti's anthropological
works reveal a usually neglected theory about human society and its
power structures. This essay was meant to diagnose the key problems of
contemporary post-World War II society.

(...) "the moment in which one person survives another is very concrete…I
believe that this experience is obscured by convention, by the things
we are supposed to feel when we witness the death of another human
being." (Canetti, 183.)

(...) Adorno says that when self-preservation grows "wild," when it loses
its relationship with those around it, it turns into a destructive
force—it is always a self-destructive force. This points to an
objective reality that has sprung from our contemporary crisis—the
crisis of self-preservation, of an instinct for survival gone wild.
Canetti then brings up what he calls "the fear of being touched,"
referring to the moment where individuals feel threatened by other
people, and because of that, they try to protect themselves from
contact with the unfamiliar by creating a space around themselves and
by striving to keep other people at a distance. (Canetti, 184.)

(...) think that here Canetti is using the term "crowds" to signify a sort
of general mentality, or ideology that were (and arguably still are)
present in many societies. There are many instances of people
genuinely believing that the air is full of spirits that manifest
themselves in massive quantities. For example, Christianity, during
the Medieval period, had many followers who thought they saw the
Devil. (Canetti, 185.) Canetti points out that such "invisible crowds"
still exist today and compares this invisible fear of the Devil with
the modern day fear of bacteria. Most of us haven't looked through a
microscope to see bacteria, but we all know it is there, and that it
is a real threat. This could also refer to threats upon huge masses of
people—an example of this could be the constant possibility of natural
disasters. The fact that people act upon their feelings brought on by
"invisible crowds," or more logically put, ideologies and beliefs,
suggests that the influence of "invisible crowds" enacts real
reactions and real events that cannot be ignored. (Canetti, 186.)
Canetti believes that "crowd symbols" are actually collective
identities that do not consist of human beings (no physical, bodily
mass) but are nevertheless felt as crowd-like; these symbols are
experienced as something we can all relate to, for example, fire, the
sea, the forest, etc. These symbols function as "mass" symbols in the
minds of individuals. These mass symbols were important for the
formation of national consciousness: "When people think of themselves
as belonging to a nation at moments of national crisis, let us say at
moments of national turmoil such as the outbreak of war, when they
think of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans, what they
have in mind is a crowd or a crowd symbol, something that they can
relate to themselves." (Canetti, 186.)

(...) Adorno asks Canetti, "In your conception of society and the masses,
what importance do you attach to this pressure, this living weight of
the masses, in contrast to the entire realm of the symbolical?" To
this Canetti responds that the value and importance of the real masses
is incomparably greater. (Canetti, 188.) Canetti says that without the
conscious artificial stimulation of larger and larger masses, the
power of dictatorships would be inconceivable: "Any human being, any
contemporary of the events of the last fifty years, anyone who has
witnessed wars…will surely feel the importance of masses." Adorno goes
on to say that movements like fascism and national socialism, no
matter how destructive and inhumane, they still possessed an element
of compromise in that even in these forms of domination, a certain
concern for the real interests of the masses have shown to break
through, however subterranean they may be. I don't think that Adorno
is trying to reduce or trivialize these forms of domination, but
rather I think he is pointing to the fact that without a compliant
mass, such a totalizing dominating system could never be in place, and
that is what we need to try to fix. The essay then turns to a closer
analysis of how the categories of crowds and power are deeply
intertwined. Adorno says that the individual finds it extremely
difficult to resist or assert himself as individual. This increases
the symbolic significance of these categories. In their (individuals)
inwardness, in their emotional life people seem to revert to an
archaic stage in which these internalized categories have such a
corporal significance that they become fully identified with them. The
only way for individuals to be able to agree or consent to their own
disempowerment is for them to reinterpret these complementary
categories so as to make them seem meaningful, even irrational, and
therefore sacred.

(...) Canetti concludes by saying that the threat of direct force (from some higher authority or maybe even your neighbor) survives in all mediations, and that every attempt to escape from it remains under the spell of the mythical circular process of doing to others what has been done to oneself. Repression leads to rebellion which leads to “wild” self-preservation which leads to death and destruction. Adorno reconciles Canetti’s conclusion by saying that by speaking about this feature of humans, by writing about it and critically analyzing it, we might find an escape from the spell. Some considerations… Is this idea of the “invisible crowd” relatable to the idea of a mass subconscious? How do we see this paradox of the self-preserving individual reverting to his herd-like mass mentality in relation to Nazism?