The Gathering | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

The gathering: community, identity and authority

April 11th, 2009

Tourist 9: http://www.arionkudasz.com/tourist2008.html

When denoting humans, 6 billion, 1 million, even 10,000, seem beyond one’s grasp: even ten people may be too many for a room.

Why do people gather in a particular place, and how do they preserve their individuality? What kind of people are they anyway? What is the purpose they unite for – if it is unity, and not chance mixing? Are they happier together? Does their union not make them ludicrous in the eyes of the outside observer? Do the participants of a mass event need the justification provided by their number to feel good, as if it were a proof of a good choice: since others are also present, this must be the right place at the right time?

Man is a social animal, but a crowd is not company. Somewhere the group ends in which every participant has a perceptibly formative role, and another, larger-scale organization begins. Social loneliness is a common occurrence in a crowd, as is voluntary uniformity and frustration. On this scale, the personal interaction of members loses its natural quality, becomes noise that hinders homogeneity, an unwanted manifestation of poor organization. It is replaced by thinking along rallying cries that answer simplistic questions. The crowd sets an obstacle to dispassionate dialogue, which is why it is favoured by dictators and whoever likes to fish in troubled waters.

Any individual would shun a crowd, yet people instinctively seek those situations where the formation of a crowd is likely. There is a shifting boundary, where the group still does not melt into the crowd, where in the foreground of the homogenous mass man seeking happiness is still identifiable.

Tourist 21: http://www.arionkudasz.com/tourist2008.html

In The Idea of the Self. Thought and experience in western Europe since the 17th Century

Jerrold Siegel writes that his

conviction [is] that social improvement is inseparable from preserving the rights and dignity of individuals, and the sense that they possess a certain degree of autonomy. When I first began to read Michel Foucault in the 1970s, I was troubled from the start by what I saw, and still see, as his underlying attempt to show that many of the institutions and ways of thinking that Western thinkers and societies had furthered on behalf of both individual and social liberation were actually vehicles for introducing new forms of subjection, more pervasive and insidious than Old Regime ones.

Thought-provoking and original as these ideas were, they seemed to me wrong-headed, and so did the view of the self that went along with them. This was the notion that in modernity the self came to be constructed inside frames of domination, creating a process that Foucault, with Althusser, called “assujettissement” – a difficult word to translate into English – in which the sense of liberation from old forms of oppression becomes itself an instrument for realising the deeper kind of domination modern ideas and institutions brought.

When Descartes says cogito ergo sum, he is, in the eyes of Heidegger and those who accept his view, dividing the world between human beings with their active consciousness on one side and a merely objective and passive outside world on the other. For Heidegger, this dichotomy stands at the root of many of the worst things in modern life, including the technological domination of nature, with all of its problematic consequences.

what Siegel describes is the inherent and eternal tension between I and We, or I+We=why?

In Dancing in the streets and the architecture of authority, I quote Barbara Ehrenreich, and ask why the need for such control and where does it start and where does it end?

Ehrenrich states

Nor can the growing size of human societies explain the long hostiity of elites to their peoples festivals and estatic rituals a hostility that goes back at least to the city states of ancient Greece, which contained only a few tens of thousands of people.

It was not a concern about crowd size that lead to Pentheus’s crackdown on the maenads or Romes massacre of its Dionysian cult. The repression of Festivities and estatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of mean and occasionally women too, who saw in the a real and urgent threat. The aspect of “civilization” that is more hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism ? both of which are fairly recent innovations ? but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient

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