Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade Disaster at Duisburg
University of Chicago
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.15>
From the moment the media coverage of the Duisburg Love Parade began, there was a pattern emerging in the descriptions of and responses to the disaster. Much of the outcome of the event was being attributed to the crowd itself, revealing a particular set of assumptions of what a crowd is and how it works. Various commenters seemed to be coming to the same conclusion: there's something intrinsically wrong with large crowds, and by extension there's something wrong with people who are drawn to them. This essay reviews this recent discourse and traces it back to earlier theories of crowd psychology as well as current debates about crowds. It also provides a critical response to the characterization of affect and subjectivity in discourse about crowds.
A lot has been said about the Duisburg Love Parade tragedy already: about the logistics of the event's planning, the politics behind bringing the event to Duisburg, first-hand accounts of the stampede, the reactions of former Love Parade organizers (e.g., Dr. Motte), and the history of the Love Parade itself.
What I want to talk about here is crowds. In the context of my own work, I've read, thought and written quite a bit about crowds—especially in dance-music settings. And so, I couldn't help but notice a pattern emerging in the descriptions of and responses to the disaster in Duisburg. Numerous commentators on the web—whether in articles or user comments—seemed to be coming to the same conclusion: there's something intrinsically wrong with large crowds, and by extension there's something wrong with people who are drawn to them.
This began with the "subtle blaming of victims", as described by Prof. Ed Galea in a post on the FSEG: Fire, Evacuation and Crowd Safety blog. Posted only a day after the event, Galea nonetheless amassed a substantial archive of links to online media coverage and commentary, all describing the event as a "crowd stampede" or "crowd panic", making the crowd and its actions the primary cause of death:
While not directly stated, the implication conveyed when these types of phrases are used is that the incident was the fault of the victims, that it was their 'unreasonable' behaviour that caused or substantially contributed to the incident and resulted in the tragic loss of life. Using such phrases is unhelpful, as it immediately diverts attention from other factors that may have contributed to or indeed been the root cause of the tragic event.
Despite questions raised about the planning and management of the event, the crowd itself remained a significant topic of discussion. In particular, many commentators took up the "crowd stampede" framing of the event and sought to explain how a group of seemingly-rational individuals could become so (self-)destructive. Take, for example, these comments from several users on MSNBC's Newsvine site, in response to a report on "mass panic" at the Love Parade:
Jherek Carnelian: A mob of people will respond like a herd of animals; that is to say, with "knee-jerk" reactions. Crowds can be dangerous. I personally avoid them.
Hedwig: During a stampede (remember what happened at Walmart less than 2 years ago?) the herd mentality sets in and the thinking logical part of our brain is temporarily overpowered by the instinctive reactions of our 'lizard brain'... Some people here say 'it disgusts them that people act like animals'. The fact is our human decision making and cognitive aspect is only a thin veneer over the basic fact that we are herd animals. Put a large enough crowd of people in one place and start applying various stimuli such as hunger, anger, fear, distrust etc and we all start to behave very predictably. If cameras had focused on the stampeding individuals and the footage been replayed to them later on, many won't remember exactly what they did or how it happened. They may remember what they felt. Fear.
Waterdog49: I'm allergic to crowds. Rash inducing.
Scott-308342: Large crowds of people are scary—any group of people, anywhere, for whatever reason, hopefully the crowd control experts learn from this.
There are at least three points being made repeatedly here: 1) all crowds are inherently dangerous; 2) crowd situations rob humans of their individual rationality and reduce them to "herd animals"; and 3) crowds are to be feared and avoided. This emphasis on emotion, irrationality and animal instincts is found not only in the comment-threads of news stories, but in the articles themselves, especially those written by authors claiming to have expertise on crowd dynamics. Jeff Wise, a science writer who has also authored a book entitled Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger, contributed articles to the blogs of both Psychology Today and Freakonomics, commenting on the events at Duisburg. In his essay for Psychology Today, entitled "Behind the Love Parade Tragedy: The Psychology of Stampedes", he writes:
Once panic takes hold, individual free will goes out the window and the mass as a whole becomes subject to a collective crowd psychology. Not only do people in such situations show a tendency to mimic the behavior of those around them, but the sheer physical force of the crowd can become irresistible, capable of bending sturdy steel stanchions and knocking down brick walls (Wise, Psychology Today: 2).
For Wise, the tragedy can be explained in terms of fear and panic, suggesting that irrational behavior takes over a crowd through imitation. Notably, it is not only rationality that is at stake here, but also "free will"; when in a crowd, your behavior is no longer your own.
In a comment thread about Duisburg on MetaFilter, concerns about crowds were mostly couched in the passive-aggressive complaint genre of incomprehension: "Why would anyone go to an event packed with over a million people?"; "I just don't get how those people would want to put themselves in such a situation"; "I don't see the attraction in being lost in a crowd like that"; "You know, you could have the same dancing, love, drugs, and whatever in the comfort of your own home with friends"; and so on. Sometimes, these expressions of bewilderment were prefaced by the author's own horror of the crowd: "First of all, I can't stand being in a crowd..."; "Crowds make me nervous, I can't imagine that being any fun"; "I'm too independent / unique / fragile / different to allow myself to be swallowed up by a crowd" (There was also an earlier comment thread that was closed after 51 comments, due to concerns about how the event was framed; essentially, the opening post made the cancellation of future Love Parades seem to be the primary tragedy, thus making the deaths at Duisburg appear to be of secondary importance.)
In all of these examples, large crowds are described as either unnatural or all too natural. Either they were inhuman consequences of modern urban living, or they were the absurd extreme of the human desire for the company of others. In either case, themes of (animal) primitivism and modernity intermingle to create an image that is uncannily both wild and artificial, savage and inauthentic.
Fear of crowds is part of a larger tradition of deploring city life that has been around since the rise of urban centers, and some have argued that such frustration is simply part of the affective fabric of urbanity (e.g., Nigel Thrift's essay "But malice aforethought: Cities and the natural history of hatred", which appears as both a journal article and a chapter in his book, Non-Representational Theory). However, the discourse on Duisburg has especially strong resonances with the field of crowd psychology [la psychologie des foules] that emerged in late 19th-century France. As the industrial revolution and rapid urbanization disrupted traditional social forms and practices, fears arose about the new social forms (or the lack thereof) emerging out of this chaos. The image of thousands of anonymous bodies milling about, cut from their social moorings and thus unpredictable, haunted many writers and politicians during this period. This was particularly significant for the French, for whom large urban masses recalled the violent mobs of the French Revolution (and, later, the Paris Commune). Some predicted that contemporary civilization was entering into an "era of crowds".
The first psychological account of urban crowds appears in the work of Gabriel Tarde: The Laws of Imitation (1890), Penal Philosophy (1890), "Les Crimes des Foules" ["The Crimes of Crowds"] in Archives d'anthropologie criminelle 7 (1892), and Opinion and the Crowd (1901). Working in the then-burgeoning field of criminology, he analyzed crowds from the standpoint of public safety and population management, thus tending to see all crowds as latently (if not always actively) dangerous. This assumption was supported by the theoretical model he used to explain the working of crowds (i.e., how it was possible for "civilized" individuals to take part in riots, mobs, panics), which included the "laws of imitation" that he used to explain nearly all social phenomena: people naturally imitate each other and, in crowds, this imitation speeds up and turns back on itself such that the whole crowd acts in erratic unison.
Gustave Le Bon would later take up Tarde's concern with crowd dynamics (Psychologie des Foules, 1895; published in translation as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1897), substituting Tarde's "laws of imitation" with a combination of cognitive erasure and "mental contagion". For Le Bon, entry into a crowd entailed a loss of one's rational capacities; one's mind is "lost" and replaced by a communal "crowd mind", whose functioning does not follow the logic of individualized human behavior. This crowd mind arises out of a dynamic of mental contagion, where the base impulses and instinctual, "primitive" drives of individual crowd members infiltrate other bodies and thus create a field of irrational, animalistic behavior. In the works of both Tarde and Le Bon (as well as many writers who came after them), comparisons are constantly being made to "primitive" societies and "barbarian" behavior.
The accounts of Tarde and Le Bon are reproduced almost identically by Jeff Wise in his writings about the deaths at the Duisburg Love Parade. In the article for Psychology Today cited earlier, he credits the imitation of behavior for the emergence of a "collective crowd psychology", fusing Tarde's "laws of imitation" with Le Bon's "crowd mind". Similarly, in his contribution to the Freakonomics blog, Wise repeats Le Bon's notion of contagion and overwhelming affect: "When crowds reach a critical density, they automatically become vulnerable to a contagion of blind fear that overwhelms any attempt at rational behavior".
Out-of-control affect (feelings, emotions) is a key concern for theorists of crowds, often serving dual-duty as both the cause and effect of crowd behavior. In a recent article, "The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd?" in Critical Inquiry (36: 4), William Mazzarella suggests that the recent emergence of the concept of "multitude" (see Hardt & Negri, Empire and Multitude) is partly an attempt to avoid the messiness and volatility of affect that is attributed to crowds. Mazzarella criticizes "multitude" theory as a sort of euphemism of crowds, which solves the "problem" of affect by ignoring it or claiming that new forms of collectivity will somehow overcome it. More to the point, he claims that analysts describe "politically progressive" collectives as multitudes, while "regressive" collectives continue to be crowds, often using the wildness of affect to mark a distinction between these two categories.
Coming from another angle, one could ask whether affect is really all that rampant and pervasive in crowds; are they always emotional tinderboxes? The physicist Andreas Schadschneider is quoted in a Physics World article on Duisburg as being skeptical about the operative role given to affect and "panic" in crowd disasters: "Safety engineers have reviewed hundreds of disasters and found that, in the vast majority of cases, such behaviour has played no—or almost no—role in the tragic events. Instead, the opposite is usually observed, with most people acting co-operatively and altruistically even under extreme conditions". With these observations in mind, we might wonder why there is such a persistent tendency to first blame emotions when something bad happens in a crowd.
In any case, what unites the "classic" crowd psychology literature of the nineteenth century is its pathologizing stance: crowds are treated first and foremost as an illness, as an aberration that needs explanation and treatment. It's no surprise, then, to discover that this scholarship was aligned with the conservative anti-democratic political wing in France at the time. Opponents of universal suffrage used these analyses to support their arguments that a nation ruled by the masses could only lead to atrocity. Why leave the nation in the hands of an "electoral mob", when an elite aristocracy could handle it with cool professionalism?
These class issues continue today. To put it bluntly, crowds come with the same class connotations that the "unwashed, teeming masses" have had ever since people have been living in cities. While supposedly classless (because they're anonymous and public), crowds are certainly not high-class or privileged. As portrayed by popular media, crowds usually happen in non-Western and/or relatively poor areas of the world, spurred on by religious fervor, hungry desperation, or sectarian hate. They are more likely to happen wherever people gather in massive numbers, which includes the cities of many rapidly-industrializing nations of the "global South", such as Brazil, India, or China. As Mazzarella points out, crowds are characterized as simultaneously "the past of the (neo)liberal democracies of the global North" and "the present of non- or insufficiently liberal polities in the global South". For many writers, in other words, crowds are what failed or incomplete democracy looks like. And who gathers into crowds in Europe or North America? Working-class "hooligans" at soccer/football games. A "Million Man March" of African-American men, marching on Washington. Anti-globalization protesters at World Trade Organization meetings. Bargain-seeking suburban shoppers mobbing a Wal-Mart on "Black Friday". Young Prolls at German techno festivals (Proll is German slang for lower-class white youth, similar to a "chav" in Britain). Whether deliberate or not, the attribution of madness, danger, irrationality, and lack of control to crowds also associates these characteristics with non-elite, non-Western, non-white, and otherwise "other" populations. These discourses teach people to be afraid of crowds, and, by association, to treat "those people" who form crowds as dangerous; it can even help justify brutal forms of control and dispersal.
And so, I was both unsurprised and disheartened to see this pathologizing stance cropping up again after Duisburg, such as in the following comment posted on the MetaFilter thread mentioned earlier:
Civil_Disobedient: Love, peace, music and dance can all be experienced in the comfort and safety of your home with small groups. There is absolutely no need to involve hundreds of thousands of people except for the fact that human beings are attracted to crowds of other human beings like moths to flames because of their intrinsic inability to find value in their own accomplishments and the desire to feel a part of something historically important so that they, by proxy, can feel historically important, despite having contributed anything but their presence.
There are a lot of things wrong with this reading of crowds and crowd psychology, only two of which I'll deal with here. Although I could agree with the claim that people rarely join crowds out of a sense of individualism or narcissism, there are at least two substantial problems here:
The arguments I'm making here are not only in response to that comment posted on MetaFilter, but also to the wide swath of pathologizing comments about crowds made since the tragedy at the Love Parade, some of which I've cited here. Crowds are capable of more than just stampedes and riots, and those who flock to them are not necessarily mindless nor are they somehow defective. After all, crowds are the stuff of riots and lynch mobs as well as of parties and pilgrimages. I'm not one to argue that crowds are the answer to human ills or even that they are necessarily good or bad. Nonetheless, I don't believe that the only difference between people who party in small clusters and people who party in teeming masses is a damaged ego. People can feel good about themselves and still want the company of a thousand friends they've never met.
Luis-Manuel Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. He is currently wrapping up a dissertation project on musical affect, intimacy and crowds in the Electronic Dance Music scenes of Paris, Berlin and Chicago. His next project will focus on "techno tourism", the politics of mobility and urban gentrification.
Associated Press. 2010. "10 Killed in Mass Panic at Germany's Love Parade". MSNBC News. 25 July: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38393697/>.
Dacey, James. 2010. "Can Crowd Dynamics Modelling Help Prevent Another Duisburg Disaster?" Physics World. 28 June: <http://physicsworld.com/blog/2010/07/can_crowd_dynamics_modelling_h.html>.
Galea, Ed. 2010. "Duisburg Love Parade Crowd Tragedy, 24 July 2010". FSEG: Fire, Evacuation and Crowd Safety Blog. 2 July: <http://fseg.gre.ac.uk/blog/?p=1>.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press.
Le Bon, Gustave. 1895. Psychologie des Foules. Paris: F. Alcan. Reprint, Paris: F. Alcan,1905.
———. 1897. The crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. 2nd ed. London: T. F. Unwin.
"Love is all around". 2010. MetaFilter. 25 July: <http://www.metafilter.com/94093/Love-is-all-around>.
Mazzarella, William. 2010. "The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd?" Critical Inquiry 36 (4). <http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/36n4/36n4_mazzarela.html>
Tarde, Gabriel de. 1890. The Laws of Imitation. Trans. E. W. C. Parsons. Paris: Félix Alcan. Reprint, Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1962.
———. 1890. Penal Philosophy. Trans. R. Howell. Boston: Storck. Reprint, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1912.
———. 1892. "Les Crimes des Foules". Archives D'Anthropologie Criminelle 7: 353–58.
———. 1901. L'Opinion et la Foule. Paris: Félix Alcan. Reprint, Paris: Sandre and Distribution l'Harmattan, 2006.
Thrift, Nigel. 2005. "But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2): 133–50.
———. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, International library of Sociology. New York: Routledge.
Wise, Jeff. 2010. "Behind the Love Parade Tragedy: The Psychology of Stampede". Psychology Today. July 24: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201007/behind-the-love-parade-tragedy-the-psychology-stampedes>.
———. 2010. "When Crowds Panic". New York Times. 3 August: <http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/when-crowds-panic/>.