COMO CITAR:
Almeida, João N. S. «Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity». Forma de Vida, 2021. https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0069 .
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0069
João N. S. Almeida
(Versão em português / Portuguese translation)
Continuing the project that Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht started with In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) and benefiting from much that has been put forward in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004), Crowds (2021) intends to speculate analytically on a subject’s ontological status when immersed in a crowd. As expected, the book is mostly anchored on continental philosophy: his references are authors interested in the being-as-body such as Husserl and Heidegger, who form the basis for a focus on the bodily presence as opposed to the dimension of intellectual meaning. Gumbrecht’s reasoning in those previous works tries to gravitate towards the body, a culture of presence and, specifically in this one, the ontological differences that being immersed in a crowd and watching sports may bring out.
Although the alleged centering of Western culture on the intellectual and mental dimension instead of the bodily and corporeal one is sometimes described by the author as a post-illuminist inheritance, it is never made entirely clear—nor is it clear, in fact—whether seeing the human being mostly or primarily as the mind is really such a recent phenomenon—three or four centuries old since the scientific revolution—or inherently part of any of the things that we call “culture” since the classical age. Gumbrecht’s point of view basically is that (1) Western culture suffers from an excess of intellectualization, which renders it unable to cope with purely bodily dimensions, (2) that such bodily dimensions of culture or being (whether we want to put it within anthropology or plain ontology) can and should be adequately approached by the professional intellectual (the writer, the philosopher, the teacher) and (3) that a literary approach to those dimensions—thinking, reading and writing—can have an intelligible result. It’s obvious that proposing a philosophical approach to undo that knot can sound paradoxical. Can such a bodily-centered proto-ontology be reconciled with an intellectual interpretation, and is it not always a fallible proposition from the start? While a culture of meaning is obviously properly addressed and cared for with verbal propositions—because, whether they are right or wrong, the medium is the appropriate one—it is not clear how this may happen on a presence culture, and whether it should or could happen at all. In any case, those who are interested in such a different ontological articulation, where the body is seen as primary instead of the mental, and choose to address it academically and critically, inevitably face that problem and have to find ways either to solve it or plainly to address it.
Sports attendance is the case in point because it is not exactly like other body-related dimensions: it contains specific and richer aspects regarding a presence culture, such as the quasi-ontological difference that being immersed in a crowd creates or the uniqueness of its corporeal experience, which is not easily described from sociological points of view. In the continuation of his other inquiries, approaching such a topic comes naturally for Gumbrecht: it becomes increasingly clear during his argument that the intensity and alienated state in which the participants find themselves while attending sports events is worth our attention. But sports and crowds seem to have always garnered both contempt and an inability to incite comprehensive critical work from the intellectual class, as most of that work ends up being specifically political, overlooking the bodily dimension per se, what it does to human interactions, and how it changes our concept of intellectual exchanges. Trying to go beyond that, Gumbrecht attempts to be more objective and list some important points regarding the uniqueness of the experience: he puts it as one of a limited sensible input, where no conversations nor deep or subtle interactions are expected, only brief exchanges of feelings, impressions and intentions; this is defined as a set of bodily lateral relations, that is, from one to the other, in a telluric form, which from then on may or may not constitute a vertical ascendance, signifying a sort of ontological transformation. That is the point where a non-intellectual transcendence can take place through the individual acting not as part of an individual body but as part of a collective one; this puts the crowd firstly as a being-in-itself and lastly as a specific and observable bodily existence which can enlighten us on whether that can be a starting point for a new ontology of presence.
We get the clear feeling that Gumbrecht is stepping into uncharted terrains when addressing this vast matter. Although an overview of modern and contemporary literature on the topic of crowds is provided, most of those who have written about it have done so from an anthropological or symbolic point of view and not exactly with an ontological proposition. But as the author points outright from the beginning, such kind of study is lacking: most intellectual approaches to masses either place them as brute amalgams of primitive impulses and sometimes, paradoxically, as quasi-autonomous agents of history. Tracing the matter in a more historical fashion does not do much help, as most theoretical conceptions of the crowd are modern, post-French Revolution. The only framework that seems to help the author comes precisely from the Christian tradition, specifically the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, where the body can be both a material recipient and a living incarnation of transcendence (p. 77); in the case of crowds, the transcendence refers not to a bodily manifestation of the divine but to a transcendence of the singular body/mind paradigm through the experience of the collective being. Another similarity with what goes on in a stadium is found in the speaking-in-tongues biblical passage, where a sort of spontaneous semi-verbal communication, though not exactly lexical, is achieved, that is, a congregation of functional bodily interactions that are not exactly barbaric, but seem to dispense with the intellect. This does not necessarily point to a spiritual dimension, but purely to an independently achieved bodily one.
All the History in the book reports too much to Modernity, at least until the fourth chapter when the concept of “the past” is brought up, which reads like too abrupt of a separation. Here, a note regarding ancient Greek culture is worth our attention: it, identifies the choir merely as the mob, also in a political sense. It seems like a mob was always seen not as a categorically different ontological entity, but merely distinguished from individual entities as something inherently political, a collective body taking decisions—though without deliberation—which might conjure up some difficulties when trying to approach it as something else rather than political. But generally, regarding representation and meaning culture, the political aspects of the crowd seem to be, as the author correctly points, a limited critical route.
In the last chapters, the author approaches the sketch of a theory, albeit a low-key one, where various proposals involving rhythm and early consciousness are suggested to explain the specific state of the stadium audience and its connection with the playfield, the way the spectators react to the players and how the separation between those two dimensions is crucial; perhaps these are the only moments in Gumbrecht, or in any other author, where we can devise concrete elements that point to the beginning of a new discourse towards crowds and their ontological status. The logical axis of such a new discourse can be foreseen as bodily interactions having a life of their own and a primordial ontological status that makes what we consider typically as mind processes something secondary. Such bodily dimension is therefore in no way inherently ideological and is also hardly translated to intellectual terminology. That seems to be Gumbrecht’s or anyone's main difficulty when dealing with that undiscovered country: how to intellectualize bodily existence per se.
In short, the claim is that the ontological status of the crowd in itself can be seen as neither related to collective deliberation as we understand it nor as absolutely equivalent to savagery. The book works well as an introductory study for the general audience[1] on the need for a non-political, and not exactly aesthetic, understanding of the body-as-being that crowd behaviour allows us to foresee. As it seems, most of the approaches to the crowd seem to equate being in a collective public body as being in a political—that is, deliberative and volitive—entity, a reading which Gumbrecht counters. By tending towards conceiving being-in-the-crowd as a possibly distinct ontological state, which may either dispense with or transform the mental dimension in a way that might necessitate very different approaches altogether, Gumbrecht proceeds forward, beyond that first step out of the mind-centered framework attempted in some of his previous works, opening up new possibilities of reflection on this topic.
[1] The book was distributed to Borussia Dortmund supporters during the last season by the club.
REFERÊNCIA:
Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021.