“It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint”.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Since history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or can have political implications, we should take careful note of the new concept that has entered the West’s political lexicon: “social distancing”. Although the term was probably conceived as a euphemism after the rawness of the previous term, “confinement”, we must ask ourselves what a political order founded on social distancing could ever amount to. This question is all the more urgent when such an order may be more than a purely theoretical hypothesis. It is increasingly being claimed that the current health emergency can be seen as the laboratory in which the political and social orders that await humanity are being prepared.
Though there are, as always, fools who will claim that such a situation can be considered to be wholly positive, and that new digital technologies have allowed us happily to communicate from a distance for some time, I do not believe that a community based on “social distancing” is humanly and politically liveable. In any case, it seems to me that, whatever one’s perspective on the matter is, this is the theme upon which we should reflect.
A first consideration is the truly unique nature of the phenomenon that “social distancing” measures have created. Canetti, in his masterpiece Crowds and Power, defines the crowd as the thing upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched. While people generally dread being touched by strangers, and while all of the distances they institute around themselves are born of this fear, the crowd is the only setting in which this fear is overthrown. “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. [...] As soon as a man has surrended himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. [...] The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. [...] This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest”.
I do not know what Canetti would have thought of the new phenomenology of the crowd that we are witnessing. What social distancing measures and panic have created is surely a mass, but a mass that is, so to speak, inverted and composed of individuals who are keeping themselves at any cost at a distance — a non-dense, rarefied mass. It is still a mass, however, if, as Canetti specifies shortly afterwards, it is defined by uniformity and passivity — in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely. [...] [I]t waits. It waits for a head to be shown it”.
A few pages later describes the crowd that is formed through a prohibition, where “a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly. They obey a prohibition, and this prohibition is sudden and self-imposed. [...] [I]n any case, it strikes with enormous power. It is as absolute as a command, but what is decisive about it is its negative character”. We should keep in mind that a community founded on social distancing would have nothing to do, as one might naïvely believe, with an individualism pushed to excess. It would be, if anything, similar to the community we see around us: a rarefied mass founded on a prohibition but, for that very reason, especially passive and compact.
Though there are, as always, fools who will claim that such a situation can be considered to be wholly positive, and that new digital technologies have allowed us happily to communicate from a distance for some time, I do not believe that a community based on “social distancing” is humanly and politically liveable. In any case, it seems to me that, whatever one’s perspective on the matter is, this is the theme upon which we should reflect.
A first consideration is the truly unique nature of the phenomenon that “social distancing” measures have created. Canetti, in his masterpiece Crowds and Power, defines the crowd as the thing upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched. While people generally dread being touched by strangers, and while all of the distances they institute around themselves are born of this fear, the crowd is the only setting in which this fear is overthrown. “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. [...] As soon as a man has surrended himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. [...] The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. [...] This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest”.
I do not know what Canetti would have thought of the new phenomenology of the crowd that we are witnessing. What social distancing measures and panic have created is surely a mass, but a mass that is, so to speak, inverted and composed of individuals who are keeping themselves at any cost at a distance — a non-dense, rarefied mass. It is still a mass, however, if, as Canetti specifies shortly afterwards, it is defined by uniformity and passivity — in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely. [...] [I]t waits. It waits for a head to be shown it”.
A few pages later describes the crowd that is formed through a prohibition, where “a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly. They obey a prohibition, and this prohibition is sudden and self-imposed. [...] [I]n any case, it strikes with enormous power. It is as absolute as a command, but what is decisive about it is its negative character”. We should keep in mind that a community founded on social distancing would have nothing to do, as one might naïvely believe, with an individualism pushed to excess. It would be, if anything, similar to the community we see around us: a rarefied mass founded on a prohibition but, for that very reason, especially passive and compact.
(English translation by Valeria Dani)
Cornelia Parker, The Distance (A Kiss With Strings Attached), 2003. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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