NOTES ON THE SWARM
“The masses have boundless creative power. They can organize themselves and concentrate on places and branches of work where they can give full play to their energy; they can concentrate on production in breadth and depth and create more and more undertakings for their own well-being.” – Mao Zedong, 1955.
At the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art, Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat’s 1999 film installation Rapture plays on opposing screens. One screen depicts mostly young and middle aged men dressed in white, moving animatedly through an old fortress. The other, across them, shows a crowd of veiled women dressed all in black, who stop and pray together and wail in unison in a rocky desert before encountering a wooden boat at the edge of the sea. A vague plaque on the wall vaguely indicates that viewers are meant to understand it as a comment on “gender,” broadly.
In a description of the installation on the Art Institute of Chicago website, the author notes that, as an expatriate to America, “Neshat maintains a critical distance that has allowed her to locate both the poetics and the power of the veil.” It’s a funny, almost Kantian turn of phrase: only with the kind of critical distance gained from exile, forced or self-imposed, can we begin to really understand something authentically. Too close though, and perhaps the viewer risks being similarly swept up in the passion of the mob, lost to the desert ourselves – going native.
For centuries, European philosophy has had an unhealthy obsession with the swarm. In German, the word Schwarmerei emerged in the early 1500s to describe “a lower form of madness,” a kind of pathological superstition that characterised the mob mentality of the religiously zealous. Though an individual could be struck with this form of madness, its primary danger was in its contagion: how it spread, like bees or birds or locusts, from field to farm to township, picking up crowds and stirring up masses, devoutly and disorderly.
From these Reformation-era roots, the concept (like all other successful viruses) mutated. By the German Late Enlightenment, the Schwarmerei’s madness took on a medical dimension, rendered literally contagious. In the wake of the terrors of the French Revolution of the 1790s, German philosophy adopted a kind of medical authoritative stance with respect to the social and moral ills posed by this form of swarming madness. Rationality, characterised by the position of the detached observer – objective, dispassionate, trustworthily reasonable, largely due to his dislocation from the mobs around him – was often found by contrast to the swarm.
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This summer I sustained a brutal bike injury and was confined to bed for days. While holed up, I watched The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1965 documentary-style retelling of the anti-colonial insurgency that preceded Algerian independence from French colonialism. The film leans heavily on eyewitness source material provided by Algerians themselves. It features dozens of real people in the real city of Algiers, and many, many crowd scenes. The crowd is as much a setting as the Casbah, as much a character as the individual protagonists. It is through these crowds of revolutionary and ordinary residents of Algiers that the action of the film is enabled, providing cover, shelter, opportunity, and motion to the city’s nascent insurgency. Crowds open and close. People move in and out. The film ends with one final, monumental crowd scene: the people of Algiers running through the city streets in protest, riding the crest of a hill in the Casbah like a wave, chanting for independence, to the eventual ejection of the French. The sight of these crowds, with all their power and momentum, makes the end of French occupation, despite its tirelessly depicted relentless brutality, feel inevitable. With all its weapons and all its power, the coloniser cannot sustain its rule in the face of the swarm.
As a film, The Battle of Algiers is sympathetic towards revolutionaries, so much so that when it was first shown in ostensibly post-colonial Europe, audiences were attacked and theatres were bombed. Yet it has also often been treated as a kind of resource for teaching effective counterinsurgency strategy. In August 2003, the Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers in an effort to get its employees to “think creatively” about civil conflict among their Arab enemies. This was in the early days of American invasion, the beginning of the official war on terror, and I’d imagine that the US Army was willing to try basically anything. Everywhere they went, they were incredibly unpopular and enormously brutal, encountering constant criticism and protest, often firing freely on crowds. The persistent spectre of civilian unrest, that every brown person might be a lethal threat, is likely what convinced the Pentagon that The Battle of Algiers was important homework for military thinkers. The Pentagon’s own flyer for the film says as much: “Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?…”
Israeli checkpoints and border walls demand single-file passage; in occupied Al-Khalil, Palestinians move to and from their homes on designated, narrow roads where Israeli settlers can watch from above and throw rocks and garbage down at them. Throughout occupied Palestine and even in exile, as Laleh Khalili argues, Palestinians endure a near constant state of surveillance from coordinated security authorities and inherited colonial knowledge, incredibly aware and fearful of the power available to the anti-colonial masses by dint of their being masses. When the Americans went to Afghanistan, they bulldozed privacy walls and pomegranate orchards to ensure that terrorists, presumed to be living secretly in every village, had nowhere to hide. In Iraq, they walled off whole sections of the city, forcing people to travel along predetermined routes and strategic bottlenecks. Masks off, veils up, hands visible, stand in the open in a single file line. Surveillance fears the swarm.
In 1736, French philosopher Voltaire wrote into Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet a parade of images that depict the people of Mecca as a swarm, a mob, a crowd, teeming and seething, calling for blood It is one of the true classic Orientalist texts, and not much has changed since then. The American Zionist Leon Uris writes similarly about the Arab revolts of Mandatory Palestine in his 1984 book The Haj, a propaganda work of historical fiction, lauding the merits of Zionist settlement. In The Haj, Uris tells of “enraged mobs” that “poured into the streets,” a “maddened swarm” with murderous intent, describing how this “always smoldering rabble [of Palestinians] had been ignited into a wildfire” by coordinated messaging from the mosques until “[the] short fuse that every Arab carries in his guts had been ignited with consummate ease.” These images, disturbingly evocative, all live together in just one paragraph, but are echoed throughout: “mobs” peopled the mosques, “swarmed” the old cities, stood in “crowds” at the gates and outside public offices, seeking only blood, or even, “no real objective except for the relief that seemed to come from rioting.”
Edward Said once commented that this depiction of the Arab, Muslim Other as undifferentiated, swarming, filled with mad fervour, also extends to the Western treatment of the victims of its aggression as being “unnamed, uncounted, unacknowledged,” in a manner ultimately produced and enabled by the image of the swarm rather than a meaningful recognition of the value and energy of mass politics. This is also likely where we get the notion of Oriental despotism, where life is “cheap” – thus necessitating further cheapening through imperial invasion. After all, how do we create value in the West without enforced privacy?Is enclosure not the root of property? How do we know which land is whose to farm, harvest, and develop if we don’t fence it in, maintain its borders, and ensure its exclusion? Value is a product of security, security requires surveillance, surveillance necessitates singularity.
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There’s something about crowds, masses, mobs, and swarms. Something unsettling, something exhilarating. In a short essay in Artforum, Hannah Black reflected on the 2020 Black uprising by naming the possibility for congregation that it opened up in a moment of seemingly indefinite shuttering. “Everything that happens in the street is a lesson because it is a point of contact,” she writes. A moment in collective education. If you’ve ever participated in mass action, you might recognize that feeling of becoming disorderly, something that only happens when many people get together and allow one another to collectively unravel. People look out for each other in this kind of space, and they also forget about each other; it yields to a different kind of camaraderie that is impossible to replicate on one’s own. It requires everyone to get in on it, to turn a geographic location into a different kind of place. Things transform. They lose their logic, gain a new one. The swarm has its own power and form. A knowing multiplicity, a multiplied knowing. Participation in collectivity, obliteration into multiplicity, engagement in mass politics, and other practices of absolution into the swarm, remind us that there is something other than the alienation imposed by capitalist forms of work and life premised upon atomization and competition. Marx called this idea the Gatungswesen – the species-essence.
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The swarm is a place-based practice of organised madness – a weapon of mass destruction. Only a weapon of truly outstanding power, breadth, and scale can attempt to meet the challenge of fighting the multiplicity that cannot be segmented into singularity. A doctrine of shock and awe. But it cannot win.
Cockroaches have lived forever; perhaps they know something that most of us are presently afraid to fully recognize. Where mass reigns, empires cannot last. The swarm endures.
Image Credits:
- Top image: Shirin Neshat, Women with Writing on Hand’s, from Rapture Series, 1999.
- Bottom image: Shirin Neshat, Untitled, from Rapture series, 1999.
Alex Verman is a refugee lawyer based in Toronto. Their work has been published in Briarpatch Magazine, The Atlantic, Jewish Currents, Xtra Magazine, and elsewhere.
Art criticism