Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso and Sighele. But Le Bon is the one who draws these dispersed though influential works together into a tradition or a theory. He constitutes an identity of crowd psychology, crowd theory or even social psychology. Le Bon was a popularizer and a synthesizer, rejected by the academic and scientific establishment, he writes for popular audiences. And with The Crowd he certainly finds one. In a sense, Le Bon perfectly instantiates the paradox of origins. They do not begin anything but are still the beginning. Le Bon is not the start of thinking about crowds. But he constitutes a discourse, or better, we retrospectively constitute the discourse of crowd theory by ascribing Le Bon the originating status. To put it in the most banal and obvious of ways: when we start talking about crowds with Le Bon, we make him the start. This origin then echoes through the oeuvre, requiring that each person who takes up the theorisation must work hard to try to overcome the origin that we ourselves perpetuate.
古斯塔夫·勒龐被視為群眾理論的起源。
Le Bon’s crowd is a savage thing. But savagery does not simply equate to condemnation – although that comes as well. To begin, the crowd is not an aggregation of individuals. It is not made up of a collection of single entities, but rather in this gathering a new subject it born. The crowd is a collective unconsciousness. When men enter the heaving mass of the crowd they descend the levels of civilisation, losing their individuality and regressing to their common unconscious nature.1 In this sense, Man’s most base instincts are released.
勒龐的群眾是一個野蠻的事物。但是野蠻並不等同於譴責 - 儘管也有這種情況。首先,群眾不是個人的集合體。它不是由單個實體的集合組成的,而是在這次聚會中誕生了一個新的主體。群眾是一種集體無意識。當人們進入群眾的沸騰質量中時,他們就會下降到文明的水平,失去個性並倒退到他們共同的無意識本性。在這個意義上,人類最基本的本能被釋放了。
A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile [in its sentiments]. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire. It is the less capable of understanding such interventions, in consequence of the feeling of irrestible power given it by its numerical strenght. The notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a crowd. An individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power given to him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him the ideas of murder and pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation.2
群眾並非只是衝動和移動[在其情感上]。像一個野蠻人,它沒有準備接受任何東西會出現在它的欲望和願望實現之間。由於其數量優勢給予的不可抗拒的力量感,它越是無法理解這種干預。對個人而言,在人群中,不可能的概念消失了。個人很清楚,單獨一個人無法縱火燒毀宮殿或劫掠商店,如果受到誘惑,他會很容易抗拒。作為群眾的一份子,他意識到數量給予他的力量,僅僅是向他暗示謀殺和搶劫的想法,他就會立即屈服於誘惑。
The crowd, ‘like a savage’ will not allow any interruption between that which it desires and the realisation of this desire. Theindividual can quickly repress any desire he might have had to overthrow, loot or pillage. His civilisation depends precisely upon his ability to suspend the realisation of his desire. In fact, the extent to which he is civilised is determined by the extent to which this thought even enters his head. Someone who has to consciously repress the urge to transgress has not sufficiently interiorised this civilisation.
群眾,「像野蠻人一樣」不會允許任何干擾在它所渴望的事物與實現這種渴望之間。個人可以迅速壓抑任何他可能有的推翻、劫掠或搶劫的慾望。他的文明正是基於他能夠暫停實現自己欲望的能力。事實上,他被文明化的程度取決於這種想法進入他腦海的程度。有意識地壓抑違法的衝動的人尚未充分內化這種文明。
The suspension of individuality in the crowd is a manifestation of the suspension of civilisation. Man is ‘torn between the primal elements of sentiment and reason, the latter having emerged only recently in human evolution and seldom exercising real influence on human affairs.… All emotions, fear, hate and sexual passions, were survivals of savagery, and, according to Le Bon, especially dominant in those who lacked the opposite principle, reason.’3 The crowd is savage, unreasoned. With the suspension of individuality, comes suggestibility. The crowd is a collective subject capable of being infinitely directed from above. This sounds like the crowd is being framed as a pure instrument, but the leader’s own psychology is not the rational Machiavellian idea that we might expect. Leaders:
在人群中個體性的暫停,是文明暫停的表現。人『被一種原始情感和理性的元素撕裂,後者在人類演化中才剛剛出現,且極少對人類事務產生實際影響。...所有情緒,恐懼、仇恨和性激情,都是野蠻殘餘,特別體現在缺乏相反原理理性的人身上。』群眾是野蠻的、無理的。伴隨個體性的暫停而來的是可被暗示性。群眾是一個可以無限受高層領導的集體主體。這聽起來好像群眾被框定為純粹的工具,但領導者自己的心理卻並非我們所期待的理性的馬基維利主義思想。領導者:
are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness…. They sacrifice their personal interest, their family – everything. The very instinct for self-preservation is entirely obliterated in them, and so much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom….. The multitude is always ready to listen to the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it. Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack.4
特別從那些痛苦神經質、易激動、半瘋狂的人員中招募。他們犧牲了個人利益、家庭,甚至一切。自我保護的本能在他們那裡完全被消除。他們所求的僅僅是烈士般的報償。群眾總是樂意傾聽一個強意志的人,他知道如何在群眾中施加自己的影響。群眾失去了意志力,本能地服從擁有他們所缺乏品質的人。
These leaders start from the mass, but break away by their fixation upon an idea. The are possessed by the idea. ‘It has taken posession of him to such a degree that everything outside it vanishes, and that every contrary opinion appears to him an error or a superstition.’5 The leader uses the crowd instrumentally, certainly, but they are not in control of their use, their desires. Instead it is the idea which possesses them that has become sovereign. Their maddness, their possession by the idea, generates a crowd that is rabid.
這些領導者起源於群眾,但被對一個想法的迷戀所束縛。他們被這個想法佔有。「它佔有他們的程度到了一個地步,以至於一切外部事物都消失了,任何相反的意見在他們看來都是錯誤或迷信。」5這位領導者無疑利用群眾,但他們並不控制他們的使用和欲望。相反,是佔有他們的想法成為了主宰。他們的瘋狂,他們被這個想法佔有,產生了狂熱的群眾。
Crucially then, the crowd become an expression of the leaders unconsciousness. 6 This unconsciousness however, is not a mystical thing, but rather it stems from the shared hereditary (racial) nature of the crowd. And this is what so often goes unsaid in the various accounts of Le Bon, particularly in the post-Freudian readings. In their regression down the line of civilisation, the crowd return to their ‘common origns’. Previously in The Psychology of Peoples, Le Bon wrote:
關鍵是,群眾成為領導者潛意識的表達。這種潛意識並非神秘事物,而是源於群眾所共享的遺傳(種族)本性。這是在各種關於勒龐的說法中常被忽略的。在退回到文明的原點上,群眾回到了他們的'共同起源'。在《人群心理學》中,勒龐曾寫到:
This identity of the mental constitution of the majority of the individuals of a race is due to very simple physiological reasons. Each individual is the product not merely of his immediate precidents but also of his race, that is of the entire series of his ascendents. A learned economist M. Cheysson has calculated that in France, supposingthere to be three generations in a century, each of us would have in his veins the blood of twenty million of the people living in the year 1000. ‘In consequence all inhabitants of a given locality, of a given district, necessarily possess common ancestors, are moulded of the same clay, bear the same impress, and they are all brought back unceasingly to the average type by this long and heavy chain, of which they are merely the last links. We are the children at once of our parents and our race. Our country is our second mother for physiological and hereditary as well as sentimental reasons.’’7
某一個種族中大多數人的心理構成的同一性,是由於非常簡單的生理原因所造成的。每個個體都不僅是其直接前輩的產物,也是其整個種族的後代。一位受學的經濟學家謝松先生計算過,在法國,假設每個世紀有三代人,那麼我們每個人的血管中都會有來自公元 1000 年時期二千萬人的血液。因此,同一地區、同一區域的所有居民都擁有共同的祖先,都是由同樣的泥土塑造,都承載著相同的印記,並且通過漫長而深重的連鎖永遠被拉回到平均類型。我們既是父母的孩子,也是種族的孩子。從生理和遺傳,也從情感上來說,我們的國家就是我們的第二個母親。
As he repeats, throughout his odious oeuvre, the crowd is an expression of the psychology of quasi-national races.8 Thus he can say that crowds ‘are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.’9 He contrasts the ‘latin crowd’ with the ‘anglo-saxon crowd’, which is more stable and less likely to spring into being at the slightest national insult.10
他不斷重複,通過他令人厭惡的作品,群眾是半民族性種族心理的表達。8因此,他可以說群眾"無一例外都帶有女性特徵,但拉丁人群眾是最具女性特點的"。9他將"拉丁人群眾"與"英美群眾"形成對比,後者更加穩定,不太容易因最微小的民族侮辱而爆發。10
Race is the crucial determining feature of Le Bon’s work. In Orientalism, Said was correct to say that Les Lois Psychologiques de L’Evolution des Peuples (1894) is the paradigm of a type of orientalism that:
种族是勒邦作品的关键决定性特征。在《东方主义》中,萨义德正确地说,《种族心理学法则》(1894)是一种东方主义范例,即:
was linked… to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien. Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analysed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over. The point is that the very designation of something as Oriental involved an already pronounced evaulative judgment, and in the case of the peoples inhabiting the decayed Ottoman Empire, an implicit program of action. Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be subjected: it was that simple.11
被連結到西方社會(違法者、精神病患者、婦女、窮人)有著可悲的異質身分。東方人很少被注意或觀看;他們被當作對象,不是作為公民或人,而是需要解決或約束的問題,或者—正如殖民大國羨慕他們的領土—需要被征服。問題在於,將某物稱為東方已涉及一項已經明確的評判,而對於居住在衰落的奧斯曼帝國的人民而言,則隱含著一項行動計劃。因為東方人是一個臣屬種族的成員,所以必須臣屬:這就是問題的核心所在。
But unlike the rest of his work where the savage others are analysed through the degenerates of France, The Crowd uses the oriental to understand ‘western civilisation’. The savage other is there within ‘western civilisation’, as Said notes.
但與他其餘作品不同,在那裡野蠻的他者是通過法國的退化者分析的,群眾使用東方人來理解'西方文明'。正如賽義德指出,野蠻的他者存在於'西方文明'之中。
In The Crowd, it is not simply a matter of denigrating the crowds as oriental, but making them ‘the objects of a new technology of power.’12 The crowds’ formation and tendencies are shaped by the shared herditary unconsciousness of the participants.13 The crowd was the savage within society/the individual, capable of terrible acts of degridation. However, Le Bon also notes that the crowd, the savage beast, is also capable of acts of ferocious heroism. In fact, he insists that were it not for the crowd, ‘civilisation would not have grown up on our planet, and humanity would have had no history.’14 The crowd is the motor of history, brutally driving mankind forward. Thus, we discover a strange moment in Le Bon’s analysis of crowds. The crowd is an echo of an old form of mankind (sentiment), supersceded in Western society by the higher level of consciousness (reason). But yet the motor of this progress, this evolution of Man, is precisely the crowd. To have history which leads to higher consciousness, Man must first regress to the unthinking, unconscious Man. Irrationality is the motor of reason. Le Bon sees a metaphysical dichotomy between ‘sentiment’ and ‘reason’; between passion, affect and savagery on one side; with civilisation, reason and individuality on the other. Because he sees reason as a recent addition in the long chain of the history of man’s evolution, it has not been ‘bedded in’. Civilisation still lies on the surface. To ‘bed it in’ further, Man must live through reason for generations. The progress of civilisation does not march inexorably, however, because the crowd (of sentiment and savagery) threatens its course. And yet this threat also presents the process whereby reason progresses.
群眾 群眾中,這不僅僅是貶低群眾為東方人,而是將他們視為「新權力技術的對象」。12參與者共同的潛意識遺傳形塑了群眾的形成及傾向。13群眾是社會/個人內部的野蠻面,能夠做出可怕的退化行為。然而,勒龐也指出,群眾這隻野獸,也同樣能夠做出勇敢的英雄主義行為。實際上,他堅持,如果沒有群眾,「文明不會在我們的星球上發展,人類也就沒有歷史」。14群眾是歷史的推動力,殘暴地推動人類前進。因此,我們在勒龐對群眾的分析中發現了一個奇特的時刻。群眾是人類舊形態(感性)的回響,在西方社會被更高層次的意識(理性)所取代。但是,這種進步,這種人類的演化,的動力正是群眾。要有導向更高意識的歷史,人類必須首先退回到無思考、無意識的狀態。非理性是理性的動力。勒龐看到「感性」和「理性」之間的形而上二元對立;一方是激情、感性和野蠻,另一方是文明、理性和個性。由於他認為理性是人類歷史長河中最近才出現的,所以它還沒有根深蒂固。文明還停留在表面。要使其深植,人類必須通過理性生活若干代。然而,文明的進步並非必然,因為群眾(感性和野蠻)的威脅也是理性進步的過程。
Le Bon draws our attention15 to the continuity between western civilisation and savage colonialism. Identifying that beastial acts are performed in the name of reason, but this beastiality is not external to reason, it is its dark side. In other words, The Crowd intuits that beastiality is actually a fundamental part of civilisation. If Man is beastial to ensure civilisation, if civilisation is civilised because of beastiality, then the two form a continuity not a break: Civilisation and barbarism are on a moebus strip, front turns into back and then front again without interruption. Civilisation is/becomes barbarism, and barbarism is/becomes civilisation. Le Bon, however, does not see this as a critique. Perhaps Le Bon did not even quite realise the contours of the idea that he was proposing. But this continuity between civilisation and barbarism, would later become crucial to the radical responses to European ‘enlightenment’ and colonialism. The Surrealists,16 for instance, in 1932 penned theMurderous Humanitarianism pamphlet: ‘The colonial machinery that extracts the last penny from natural advantages hammers away with the joyful regularity of a pole ax. The white man preaches, doses, vaccinates, assassinates and (from himself) receives absolution. With his psalms, his speeches, his guarantees of liberty, equality and fraternity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine guns.’ Or again, differently in 1950 Aimé Césaire would write in Discourse on Colonialism:
勒邦引起我們的注意15到西方文明與野蠻殖民主義之間的連續性。他認定野獸般的行為是以理性的名義來進行的,但這種野蠻性並不是外在於理性,而是它的黑暗面。換句話說,群眾直覺到野蠻性實際上是文明的基本組成部分。如果人為了確保文明而表現得野蠻,如果文明是因為野蠻性而文明,那麼這兩者就是連續而非分裂的:文明和野蠻是在一條莫比烏斯帶上,前變成後,後再變前,無間斷地循環。文明就是/變成野蠻,野蠻就是/變成文明。然而,勒邦並未將此視為批判。也許勒邦自己也未完全意識到他所提出概念的輪廓。但這種文明與野蠻的連續性,日後將成為對歐洲"啟蒙"和殖民主義的激進回應的關鍵。例如,在 1932 年,超現實主義者16寫下了殺人的人道主義小冊:「殖民機器從自然優勢中榨取最後一文錢,以斧頭般的快樂規律砰砰作響。白人傳教,施藥,接種,刺殺,並(從自己身上)獲得赦免。憑藉他的詩篇、演講和自由、平等、博愛的保證,他試圖淹沒機關槍的聲音。」又或者,1950 年艾美·塞澤爾在《殖民主義演講》中寫道:
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilisation acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated…, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and slowly but surely, he continent proceeds toward savagery.17
首先,我們必須研究殖民化如何使殖民者去文明化,在真正意義上使其野蠻化,使其墮落,喚醒其被埋藏的本能,如貪婪、暴力、種族仇恨和道德相對主義。我們必須表明,每當越南和法國斬首一人,他們都接受這個事實;每當一個小女孩被強暴,他們都接受這個事實;每當一個馬達加斯加人遭到酷刑,他們都接受這個事實,文明就會增添另一個死亡的負重,一種普遍的倒退就會發生,一種溃疽就會開始蔓延;最後,在所有被違反的條約、被散佈的謊言之後,在所有被鼓勵的種族虛榮和被展示的自負之後,一種毒藥就被酿造進了歐洲的血管,慢慢而確定地,這個大陸走向野蠻。
He notes that Fascism was the result of a ‘boomerang effect’: ‘before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.’18
他指出,法西斯主義是一種"回旋效應"的結果:"在成為它的受害者之前,他們是它的同謀;他們容忍納粹主義在它被加諸於他們之前,他們原諒了它,閉上眼睛,合法化了它,因為在那之前,它只被施加到非歐洲人民身上。"18
As Laclau notes, The Crowd stands at a crossroads, between the nineteenth century ways of thinking about crowds as an abberation and the modern reality wherein they were destined to stay. In this, ‘they cannot be dismissed and summarily condemned, but have to become the objects of a new technology of power.’19 The life of the crowd must become the new political technology, it is difficult to imagine a more perfect instantiation of biopolitics. In fact the entire edifice of Le Bon’s thought is like a microcosm of an intense biopolitics: The common heredity (the biological life and lineage) of a race determines the unconscious of a particular national grouping. The racial heredity is fed back to the same grouping as a process of valorising its power to overcome its denigration. This unconscious emerges in crowds which are, to be turned to the task of renewing western civilisation. The savage crowd must be disciplined, but also it must be brought to bear on the declining civilisation to drive its evolution onwards. It is disciplined by the right sort of leaders.
正如拉克勞所指出的,《群眾》站在十九世紀將群眾視為異常現象與現代現實之間的十字路口,後者認為群眾注定會持續存在。在這裡,「群眾不能被輕易地否定和定罪,而必須成為新權力技術的對象」。群眾的生活必須成為新的政治技術,這完全體現了生政治學的概念。事實上,勒龐的思想體系就像是一個激烈的生政治學的縮影:種族的共同遺傳(生物學上的生命和系譜)決定了特定民族群體的潛意識。這種種族遺傳又回饋給同一群體,成為提升其力量以克服羞辱的過程。這種潛意識在群眾中浮現,並將其導向更新西方文明的任務。野蠻的群眾必須受到紀律約束,但也必須用來推動衰落的文明向前發展。它由適當的領導者加以約束。
With Le Bon, as I began, we have reached an origin. The origin of a thinking of crowds, whose line runs from the colonial through to fascism and into certain (paramilitary) police logics. It is not the denigration of the crowd that is the problem. It is not his politics, as many theorists suggest. Rather it is his very ontology that is at stake. As we have seen from the various recuperations of Schmitt, one’s politics can be undermined if there is the germ of utility in your ontology. However, Le Bon’s ontology is poison. When placed upon the racial register it becomes precisely the stuff of fascism.
與勒邦一起,正如我開始時所說,我們已經到達一個源頭。群眾思想的源頭,其線條從殖民主義一直延伸到法西斯主義,並進入某些(半軍事性)警察邏輯。問題不在於對群眾的貶低。問題也不在於他的政治,正如許多理論家所建議的那樣。問題在於他的本體論本身。正如我們從施米特的各種復興中看到的,如果你的本體論中存在效用的種子,你的政治就可能受到破壞。然而,勒邦的本體論是有毒的。當它被置於種族登記冊上時,它正好成為法西斯主義的材料。
Details of the Crowded Sovereignty Project can be found here, along with all previous posts.
人群主權計劃的詳情可在此找到,以及所有先前的帖子。
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