The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up the house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. [---] Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we may liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I,” at every instant rendering and explaining it in a picture, which is always unstable and fugitive.

In the first step, the appetite of the I for the non-I leads to a dissolution of the ego, or rather to a blurring of the limit between subject and object in the movement of absorption. But the peculiar capacity of the artist is that he is also able to take a step back and reflect on his immersion, and Baudelaire this provides us with an inversion of the first scene: ”now it is evening,” he continues, and “at a time when others are asleep, Monsieur G. is bending over his table, darting on to a sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago was directing towards external things.” In this reclusive and nocturnal space ”the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful,” the “phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature,” and “all the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness.”
In Baudelaire’s aesthetic these two movements, abandon and withdrawal, relate to each other as the ”fugitive” and the ”eternal” elements in his equation of fashion and modernity, which only together make up perfect beauty: just as the immersion in the spectacle, the evanescent and ephemeral make up the outer shell without which the inner and eternal essence would remain abstract and lifeless, incapable of moving us, deprived of both time and space. This is no doubt a most precarious balance, not least because all those techniques and procedures that had hitherto defined painting as a fine art—the presence of the model, the concentration and meditation on the motif, the whole institution of the painterly gaze that gradually transfigures the object and resuscitates it on the canvas—seem to evaporate in the face of “modern life,” within which they appear as ineffective and obsolete, and must be reconstructed on the basis of fleeting memory images. Attention and the focused gaze only become possible afterwards, after a first distraction and dispersal where the sensory impressions are received in a disorderly manner, which is at once the modern artist’s condition of possibility and the threat of his imminent destruction.
But what, then, should we say on a more theoretical level of this crowd, this “immense reservoir of electric energy,” to which the artist must respond like a mirror, or a kaleidoscope that reproduces its teeming multiplicity of life? To many social theorists of the period the very word suggested something akin to Baudelaire’s experience, a paradoxical entity just as fleeting and evanescent, as it is substantial and massive. In Tarde’s version, the crowd is a result of unpredictable micro-behaviors, it is something that emerges and coalesces through the interaction of molecules in aberrant motion—but once it has acquired its form and achieved a certain momentum, it can no longer be stopped. As Tarde’s master Leibniz shows, the wave may indeed consist of drops of water, but once you hit it at a certain speed, it will become just as hard as rock and smash the boat to pieces.
This influence of Leibniz on Tarde has recently been highlighted, and in a text like Monadologie et sociologie we can see him setting out a whole Leibnizian program for a new social science, which begins from small perceptions, differential relations, and integrates consciousness in a larger whole. This “new Tarde” has attracted considerable attention among social scientists and philosophers, to the point that some have even referred to a kind of “neo-Tardianism.” Once almost wholly eclipsed by the fame of Durkheim and his objectivist view of “social facts” as entities that transcend individual consciousness, and rejected because of his alleged reliance on psychology, individualism, and spiritualism, Tarde has indeed returned, although today his work tends to be read in a way that cuts across the alternative between individual psychology and systems analysis, and locates a different level of research, a “pure sociology” that is also a “micro-sociology” of deviant behaviors and minuscule displacements. Tarde’s analyses both of how actions are reproduced through processes of imitation, and of how transformations are brought about by acts of invention made by “small men,” defy the opposition between individual and group, and locate the decisive events on a level where differences and repetitions of small gestures and postures, turns of conversation and minute shifts come together in order to form those entities that we perceive as self-contained subjects with their beliefs and habits. ”Let us not forget,” Tarde writes in The Laws of Imitation (1890), ”that every invention and every discovery consists of the interference in somebody's mind of certain old pieces of information that have generally been handed down by others.” On the basis of this far-reaching idea of mimetic processes, he can ask: ”What is society?” and he does not hesitate to respond: “I have answered: Society is imitation.” Imitation follows its own logic, and is what constitutes the source of authority and power: “Three quarters of the time,” Tarde says, “we obey a man because we seem him obeyed by others.”
If individuals are in fact nothing more than interferences of repetitions, then something similar can also be said of institutions: Certain traits are repeated, they become successful, and acquire a “fit” with existing customs, which in turn are themselves made up of sedimented repetitions. Tarde significantly stresses the importance that urban centers and their particularly intensified forms an spatial interaction play in the modern world, where they have come to form “aristocracies of place” usurping the role previously placed by courts: Paris, Tarde writes, “unquestionably rules more royally and more orientally over the provinces than the court ever ruled over the city.” In the social space of modernity the “imitative rays” however propagate horizontally rather than vertically, their velocity increases constantly, and they thrive on new forms of communication, all of which explains why the phenomenon of “fashion” has become so pervasive in. and Tarde here obviously situates himself in the wake of Baudelaire’s prophetic remarks. Fashion, in Tarde’s analysis, is the fundamental feature of a kind of hypersociality, which also, in a twist that is surely not unique to Tarde (a similar tension organizes Baudelaire’s description of the painter of modern life) although it in him attains a particularly acute and exacerbated form, is at once the fundamental manifestation and destruction of the social. This tension can then be split up in two opposed origins of the social, which Tarde locates in the family the and crowd or “mob” (foule); in the first imitation originates in the father, in the second in the leader; the family conserves customs and stability, whereas the crowd introduces a revolutionary potential, precisely because its imitative logic is bashed in the ephemeral quality of fashion that always promotes the new; the family has its base in rural life, the crowd in the city. The crowd, Tarde writes in a passage that brings out its dangerous potential, is a  “gathering of heterogeneous moments, unknown to each other,” brought about by a “spark of passion” that “electrifies” a “confused mass,” so that “noise becomes a voice,” a “single animal, a wild beast without a name, which marches to its goal with an irresistible finality.”
It is thus not surprising that the important part of Tarde’s work that is dedicated to the  “crowd” (la foule), displays a profound ambivalence, even anxiety, which was felt by most social theorists of the period in the face of the crowd phenomenon. The emergence of the crowd was a constant source of fear, and arguably it not only impacted on the emerging social sciences, particularly in their way of conceptualizing urban space, but constituted the fundamental and decisive experience. Tarde’s negative view of the crowd phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that he develops many of his ideas in the framework of criminology and penal philosophy: particular and strange crimes, he suggests, for which it seems impossible to find sufficient motives in the individual perpetrators, appear to spread like ripples through society, as if they were fashions. On the other hand, he notest that the at least theoretically conceivable perfection of the social must have a form that is structurally similar to, perhaps even indistinguishable from, the crowd, i.e., an “intense concentration of urban life” within which creative ideas are “instantaneously transmitted to all good minds throughout the city.” As if to contain this possibility, Tarde always stresses the importance of the family, the father, and imitation through custom, which must be able to regulate and contain the amorphous sociality of the crowd, and to make sure that the “voice” that emerges out of the “noise” always retains an echo of his master’s voice, as it were; but also, on a level where the father now reappears in the guise of Public Reason, the possible elevation of the crowd into a public, i.e. a collectivity based in a purely spiritual interaction and cohesion that transfigures urban space into a more ideal entity. As such, these rational publics (examples of which Tarde finds in the readers of newspapers) form the telos of modernity, although each one of them will always remain a “potential crowd” that might fall back into brute physical space and the coarse interaction of bodies. Tarde eventually suggests that the true problem cannot be prevent the formation of crowds, which would run against the very nature of the social, but to prevent publics from regressing to crowds and allow crowds to evolve into publics, and that “profound research” remains to be undertaken with respect to the exact relation between these two forms of the social.

II.
The Metropolis, everyone seemed to think, would soon spin out of control unless we develop techniques for surveying and disciplining the unruly multiplicity of individuals that traverse it. The anxiety that motivated the early social theorists has through their work entered into a kind of general social unconscious: once the individual has been liberated from his organic inclusion in the rural Gemeinschaft, he will be thrown into the aleatory spaces of the Gesellschaft where he will bond with complete strangers, create new and temporary liaisons, and become susceptible to the irrational mechanisms of “imitation” that Tarde diagnosed, now understood as something purely negative. He will, in short, become a member of all possible crowds that can form everywhere, and someone whose behavior signals a new type of irrationality, where the “crowd” overtakes the rational behavior of the “public.” There is always a potential violent derailing inherent in all kinds of staging of social space, an oscillation that must be contained and controlled, so that its energy can be led through the conduits of a possible public—and the means for this containment will indeed many “small inventions,” even down to technical gadgets that can be put to use in the project of public formation.
The first part of Anna Ådahl’s diptych Staging Independence may be taken as showing us the props for such a violent staging. The objects on display refer to different techniques for crowd control, or ways in which the crowd has been understood as a potential and malleable mass. This is the case of Human Pyramid, a structure constructed to carry a mass of people. It refers us back to a photograph by Rodchenko, Female Pyramid  (1936), from a period when Constructivist art, willingly or not, was moving into a propagandistic phase, and when artists like Rodchenko and Lissitzky were re-functioning their techniques in the service of a violently authoritarian state apparatus. Rodchenko’s form has here been returned to a more abstract or neutral state, and we might be tempted to approach it simply as abstract sculpture, or perhaps as belonging to a new “laboratory phase,” to use the term employed by the Constructivists themselves to denote the preparatory period of formal exercises, before the work could be put to its true use: to design the behavior of the urban masses.
A more benign facet of mass control can be seen in a work like Democracy, a series of photographs of the well-known Swedish institution “People’s Park” (“Folkpark”), something in between a fun fair and place of political rallying. Less eerie than the scaffolding for the human pyramid, perhaps even provoking a certain tenderness and nostalgia, these photographs show us the architecture and props of the Swedish welfare state, which indeed too was concerned with control, although in a much more fluid and perhaps subtle fashion. Other works refer in a more generic way to the idea of masses and crowds: Crowd Control and Loudspeaker, whereas the video Fire alludes to Elias Canetti’s analysis of the logic of crowds in his monumental book Masse und Macht, a work which draws upon many of the early ideas of the emerging social sciences from the turn of the century.
The “independence” being staged in this complex installation could be taken both as the emancipation of a certain individuality, which would lead to a double conflict, both with the organic order that is negated, and with the crowd that threatens to engulf the subject, or as the independence and political autonomy of the masses (the class, the race, the new political Subject of whatever nature it may have), which in their turn require a set of instruments to become disciplined into a coherent unity. In a certain way the installation is it were waiting to be filled, perhaps with our fears and anxieties, but also our fascination and longing for future collective orders. It proposes a machine with which we can think, but also fantasize and dream; it provides a negative of the crowd, of the urban masses.
The film In Dependence (2008) creates an assemblage of two highly different visual sources. On the one hand, there are scenes from film history, drawn from films by Eisenstein and King Vidor, Beatles concerts, Broadway musicals, staged political events in the Stalinist form of the “society of spectacle,” the parades, etc. These are then pitted against a series of scenes showing two individuals, locked up in an apartment, who mimic the movements and behaviors of the crowd, imitations and adaptations, in a peculiar pas de deux, moving from a sense of isolation to the acting out of physical contact and even violence.
In one sense, the film may be read as taking us through the three classical steps in the life of the crowd, seen from the point of view of individuality: the moment of participation and the initial abandon of the self, the collective energy unleashed when the new transpersonal unity is formed, and the ensuing moment of disruption, when individuality is regained, wills begin to diverge, and violence now spreads just as contagiously as mimetic fusion in the first moment.
But perhaps we may also see it, in tune with some of the indications by Tarde referred to above, in terms of different rhythms, the differences and repetitions in gestures and movements by which a provisional identity is formed in the first place, as the instable genesis of minds—two minds in the case of the film, if we are to trust the boundaries provided by skin and flesh, which is by no means sure. As Tarde underlines, the difference and delay in hesitation, produced at the intersection of two imitative rays, already makes each every individual into a society. The question is neither the individual nor the collective, as Tarde might say, but the small imitative rays that pass through them, that intersect at the point of a local individuality and produces a hesitation, a fluctuation that traverses both mind and body, and may occasion an “invention” that in turn will emit new rays.