The Psychology and Politics of the Collective: Groups, Crowds and Mass Identifications

230 Pages·2012·1.86 MB·English

by  Ruth Parkin-Gounelas (ed.)

The Psychology and
Politics of the Collective
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
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Mark Olssen Edited by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas

The Psychology and
Politics of the Collective
Groups, Crowds and Mass Identifi cations
Edited by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The psychology and politics of the collective : groups, crowds, and
mass identifications / edited by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas. -- 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 75)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Social groups. 2. Social psychology. 3. Group identity.
4. Individuality. 5. Collective behavior. 6. Online social
networks. I. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, 1950–
HM716.P793 2012
302.3—dc23
2011040462
ISBN: 978-0-415-51026-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-12322-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents
Introduction 1
RUTH PARKIN-GOUNELAS
PART I
Psychoanalysis and the Group
1 Brother Animal’s Long Tail: Sigmund Freud,
Victor Tausk and Intellectual Infl uence 21
MANDY MERCK
2 Mass Enjoyment and the Society of the
Camp: The Revised Case of Dorian Gray 36
JOSIANE PACCAUD-HUGUET
3 Interview with Ernesto Laclau 50
RUTH PARKIN-GOUNELAS
PART II
What’s in a Crowd?
4 Crowds, Agency and Passion:
Reconsidering the Roots of the Social Bond 67
STEPHEN REICHER
5 “A Swinish Multitude” versus “A Crowd of Golden Daff odils” 86
JINA POLITI
viii Contents
6 The Masses as a “Vanishing Mediator”: Class and
Politics in Dušan Kovačević’s The Professional 103
SEAN HOMER
PART III
Global Networks and Mass Identifi cations
7 Globality, the Totalitarian Mass and National Belonging 121
EFFIE YIANNOPOULOU
8 Geographies of Cultural Globalisation
and Cosmopolitanisms of the Future 136
JOSEPH MICHAEL GRATALE
9 “Touching Everyone”: Media Identifi cations,
Imagined Communities and New Media
Technologies in the Case of Madeleine McCann 152
NICOLA REHLING
10 Swarm Intelligence: Blogging and On-Line Subjectivities 168
HOLGER BRIEL
Epilogue: Pluralities to Come 183
RUTH PARKIN-GOUNELAS
Contributors 189
References 193
Index 211
Introduction
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas
It is a curious subject to enquire into the due medium between indi-
viduality and concert. On the one hand, it is to be observed that
human beings are formed for society. Without society, we shall
probably be deprived of the most eminent enjoyments of which our
nature is susceptible. In society, no man possessing the genuine
marks of a man can stand alone . . . On the other hand, individual-
ity is of the very essence of intellectual excellence. He that resigns
himself wholly to sympathy and imitation can possess little of men-
tal strength or accuracy.
(Godwin 756–57)
The subject of the relationship between the individual and the social group
is no less “curious” today than it was in the 1790s when William Godwin
was writing. How could it be otherwise, with something so fundamental
to the human condition which is simultaneously obvious yet elusive? For
all his quaintly anachronistic faith in the enduring “excellence” of the indi-
vidual,1 Godwin understood very well, and in ways that are of particular
relevance today, that periods of radical social and cultural upheaval call for
an equally radical assessment of the individual-group relationship. Poised
as he was on the crest of the fi rst wave of industrial expansion, he was
acutely sensitive to the way this relationship tests out the inter-implication
of the historically specifi c and the universal. On the one side, in his day,
were the historical forces of capitalism (the above passage is from Book
VIII, “Of Property”) and the high idealism of the French Revolution, of
which he was a prominent champion. On the other were the universals of
“Justice,” “Morals” and “Happiness” of his book’s title, which he followed
eighteenth-century philosophy in putting at the centre of his discussion.
In taking on afresh such old and intractable questions as these, as well as
other related ones like the confl icting claims of cognition and aff ect (which
as Enlightenment Romantic he was also well placed to tackle), Godwin
gave a scope to his “curious” topic that subsequent periods, with their more
rigid dichotomies, have rarely been able to match.
To move from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-fi rst century is
to be struck by the ways in which radical philosophy today has returned
to these very same questions, but this time against the grain of Godwin’s
founding faith in individualism. Over two centuries of colonial imperialism