On the uses of fairy dust: contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds[1]
Abstract
We look to mythic resources to help us narrativise and conceptualise instances of “affective contagion” within social movements. We first review “Crowd Theory”, from Gustave Le Bon to Freud, and then the mimetics of Richard Dawkins and his followers. We find both theories lacking when it comes to accounting for collective agency. Next we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, conception of capitalist sorcery and their suggestion of crafting techniques to protect oneself against capitalism’s spells, to “denaturalise” capitalism and thus to repotentialise the world. While Pignarre and Stengers draw inspiration from neo-pagan witches, we instead look the annals of pop history, where we discover 1960s band The Troggs struggling to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. We take their “sprinkling of fairy dust” notion and apply it to anti-capitalist struggles.
Keywords: Social movements, Myth, Virality, Crowds, Memes, Sorcery.
The 2011 cycle of protests saw oppositional movements emerging and spreading with awesome speed. Starting with the Arab Spring counter-systemic activities jumped the Mediterranean, inspiring the Spanish “15M”, the Greek “Indignants” and many more before morphing into the Occupy movement; in England the summer ended with a contagion of riots that swept across London and other towns and cities. Seeking explanations for “why it’s kicking off everywhere”, Paul Mason (2012, 65-85) identified two new “sociological types” at “the centre of all the protest movements”: alongside “the graduate with no future” was the “Jacobin with a laptop”; the result was “networked revolution”. While social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook clearly played a role in expanding those movements, this in itself is not enough to explain the power of these events. Struggles have always circulated one way or another – in the 1790s the Black Jacobins in Haiti and Parisian revolutionaries couldn’t rely on tweets, but news went back and forth on the ships that crossed the Atlantic. So while the affordances of social media have brought the “viral” nature of this circulation to the fore they are not enough to explain why some events and practices, rather than others, are taken up, re-interpreted and re-played elsewhere.
In this paper we draw on folk and mythic resources to help us address the problem of collective agency in social movements that become gripped by moments of “affective contagion”.[2] Our era has been dominated by two episodes of affective contagion. The first instance was the economic crisis, which despite its deep structural causes, became manifest through a spreading wave of panicked affect. Secondly, and in response to the first, we have witnessed several connected waves of popular uprising and explosive social movements including the turbulent 2011 mentioned above, but also the Brazilian and Turkish events of 2013. We believe that both the crisis and the movements that followed them have been shaped and shrouded by myths that need dispelling.
Perhaps the most pertinent example of myth surrounding the former is found in the “magical thinking” that Clark and Newman (2012) identify within the underlying logic of “expansionary austerity”, still the dominant policy response to the crisis in the UK and Europe. Krugman (2010) explains this logic:
Don’t worry: spending cuts may hurt, but the confidence fairy will take away the pain. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, in a recent interview. Why? Because “confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery.”
We can trace Krugman’s “confidence fairy” back to Keynes’s discussion, in The General Theory (1936), of the psychological factors – what he called “animal spirits” – that guide individuals’ economic actions. These psychological factors are, he explained, the amalgam of an individual’s beliefs concerning other individuals’ and institutions’ future actions, which cannot be rationally predicted. Keynes argued that in the context of subdued “animal spirits”, governments should spend money to restore confidence; Trichet (and other austerity-implementing policy-makers) are channeling the “Treasury view” that Keynes railed against, which has as its more modern incarnations monetarism and “rational expectations” theory. In this pro-austerity view, any government spending tends to “crowd out” private sector economic activity, which may well prolong the downturn as private economic actors will lose confidence in their government’s ability to pursue sound policies.
This figure of the “confidence fairy” shows the central role that considerations of collective affect play in contemporary mainstream economics. Indeed, prefiguring the direction of our argument we can even see policy makers attempting to exorcise the affective contagions of panic and despondency through policy incantations that will summon up the affect of confidence.
Our focus, however, is dispelling the myths through which anti-austerity movements must move, in particular, the twins myths that either ‘leaders’ are necessary or that leadership is unnecessary, and the myth that a politics based solely on rationality and rational thinking is sufficient. We begin by discussing alternative approaches to understanding “the crowd” and the relationship between the crowd and leaders(hip). Here we move from Le Bon to Freud before considering recent insights from “critical leadership studies” and other scholars sympathetic to the notions of “leaderlessness” and “distributed leadership”. We then turn our attention to the question of “virality” and “contagion”. Examining Richard Dawkins’s (1976) concept of the “meme”, we argue that this metaphor tends to naturalise what already exists: human agency is removed by placing the meme centre-stage, and casting its accompanying algorithm of imitation and mutation as the actor, the “blind watchmaker” (Dawkins 1988). More generally, we argue that memetics is a poor concept for grasping the cascading effect of sharing on social media, in part because of its inability to account for collective agency but also because its association with the kind of Socio-Darwinism that acts as a principle mythic supplement for neoliberal subjectivity.
In opposition to the thrust of Dawkins’s self-declared war on religion, we wish to move beyond the limiting concepts of both Crowd Theory and mimetics by delving into the mythical and indeed “supernatural” realms. In these sections we first review the argument of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) that capitalism is a system of sorcery, albeit one without any sorcerers. In such a world, we need techniques that grant us some protection against “capitalist sorcery”, that “disenchant”. While Pignarre and Stengers look to the neo-pagan witches of the alter-globalisation movement for their counter-rituals, we turn to the invocation of “fairy dust” by a desperate member of 1960s pop band The Troggs. We use this resort to the mythic to help us interpret some recent social movements, which appear to have spread horizontally without recourse to pre-established links or established leaders. In this way we hope to unearth the contemporary incantations of a politics of lateral affective contagion.
Here then we understand myths as narratives that help us make sense of the world. In particular we are concerned with myths/narratives that inform our understanding of the role of individual human agency in socio-economic change (vis-à-vis both ‘lower’ units such as the gene or ‘meme’ and ‘higher’ such as the collective). We understand these narratives as mythical for two reasons: first, because they are partial, not universal as frequently claimed; and second, because they operate at least partially at the level of affect or emotion. For this reason, myths cannot be opposed simply with ‘rational’ ideas; counter-myths are also required.
Ocholophobia
The idea that explosive, contentious politics spreads contagiously has a long pedigree. The reactionary Prince Metternich reached for a viral metaphor when he declared, in response to the 1848 cycle of European revolutions: “when Paris sneezes Europe catches a cold.” The more sustained reactionary genre of Crowd Theory developed in the shadow of the 1871 Paris Commune, which, coming after a century of collective action, had forced the crowd to the centre of the political stage. These experiences produced real analytical difficulties for the emergent liberal ontological narrative of the rational, autonomous liberal individual. In response, a series of French and Italian writers brought the newly emerging “sciences” of sociology and psychology to bear on the problem, discovering that far from being a force for progress, the crowd events of recent history were atavistic eruptions of primitive, irrational behaviour. For Crowd Theory the paradigmatic problem was the juridical one of assigning individual responsibility within collective acts. The theory sets up an individual of good character who is “swept up” by a crowd, commiting acts they would otherwise not consider. Crowd Theory is thus an attempt to account for affective contagion within an individualist ontology that denies collective agency. The Crowd Theorists found the means of doing so through the figure of the crowd leader. Though they differed on the mechanisms involved, there was general agreement that crowds formed in relation to leaders and that at least part of the collective subjectivity of the crowd was in fact a reflection of the individual subjectivity of the leader (King 1990). We can see such a schema at work in Gustave Le Bon’s bestselling book The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind.
Le Bon (2001, 2) begins by setting out the distinction between the individual mind and the crowd mind:
Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed; doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics… It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.
The mechanics of this mental unity are threefold. Firstly, “the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power” which in turn leads to a loss of inhibitions. Secondly, the crowd causes an affect of contagion where “every sentiment is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest” (2001, 6-7). Lastly, and most importantly, membership of a crowd mentality lowers the participant’s intelligence and leads to a heightened suggestibility. This leaves the crowd open to hypnotism by crowd leaders with any suggestion immediately reinforced by the mechanism of contagion. Although the crowd can come together without leaders, which means its hypnosis can be self-induced, Le Bon makes clear that crowds “are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master” (2001, 75). In other words, the crowd’s suggestibility needs a leader and so crowds automatically seek one out.
Le Bon’s schema was designed to play on the predominant bourgeois fears of his time. As the leading crowd agitators of the late nineteenth century were of a socialist, communist or anarchist bent, then the danger, seemingly embodied by the Paris Commune, was that the suggestible masses of the newly teeming cities would be led to embrace a primitive, atavistic communism. In response Le Bon offered his book as a guide to the counter-manipulation of crowds by established elites.
When Freud (2001) comes to consider group psychology he takes Le Bon as his starting point, fully accepting his description of crowd phenomena. His sole point of criticism is that hypnotism is an inadequate explanation of the mental unity of the crowd. For Freud formation of the ego takes place, in part, through identification with external objects that act as ego ideals. This identification, as one of the earliest libidinal ties, is usually with the father. However in certain situations another object can take the place of the father as the ego ideal. So for Freud (2001, 116) a crowd consists of a “number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” This common object is the leader. Each individual in the crowd has a libidinal investment in the leader. However the leader, as a single person, cannot reciprocate all the libidinal energy that has been invested in him. There is a surplus that becomes invested in the other participants of the crowd, who can identify with one another as common egos since they share the same ego ideal.
Despite its long-lasting popularity Le Bon’s description of the crowd is unable to account for a significant amount of crowd behaviour. Not all crowds act stupidly or irrationally, for example. Freud’s conception has the advantage of identifying the crowd with the circulation of sublimated libidinal bonds. This allows him to account for crowds without diagnosing a necessary reduction in intelligence. There is though much crowd behaviour that still seems to escape Freud’s description. His account seems limited to crowds in their most paranoiac form; indeed the image brought to mind is of a Nuremburg rally gripped by the oratory of Hitler.[3] We can suppose that Freud would advocate the adoption of a better father figure, but the anti-democratic political message of his theory is clear. Just as there can be no family without a father, so there can be no society without leaders. Indeed Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 102) describe Freud’s schema as: