According to late nineteenth-century crowd theory, modern cities are overwhelmed by crowds that carry away the urban inhabitants. The main mechanism suggested by fin-de-siècle sociologists to explain crowd behaviour is that of hypnotic suggestion, with people essentially being hypnotized by the crowd leader. This explanatory framework later fell into disrepute and together with it, classical crowd ideas were consigned to the dustbin of social theory. In this talk, I argue for resuscitating parts of the fin-de-siècle crowd theorization. First, I argue that the psychotherapy debates that inspired the use of the notion of hypnotic suggestion contain a more nuanced conception of individuality than that of individuals submitting entirely to the hypnotist. Instead, they give rise to a notion of ‘tensional individuality’, according to which individuality is given in a tensional relationship between mimetic features (imitating others) and anti-mimetic ones (some core independence or autonomy). That said, second, in crowd situations – or what I call ‘social avalanches’ – mimesis takes over and precisely this possibility constituted a major concern amongst many early twentieth-century urban sociologists, architects and urban planners. I shall discuss this with reference to Robert E. Park’s reflections on cities, including how he established connections between crowds, cities and financial markets, in effect seeing the latter as main sites for urban crowd dynamics. Third, and fast-forwarding to the present, I suggest that Park’s and others’ recognition of the links between crowds, cities and financial markets deserves renewed attention in the light of current developments towards fully automated trading. Specifically, I suggest that, like urban inhabitants, automated trading algorithms are characterized by tensional individuality just as they occasionally avalanche.
Christian Borch is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Theory at the Copenhagen Business School and the PI of the ERC-funded AlgoFinance research project (http://info.cbs.dk/algofinance). His latest book is Social Avalanche (Cambridge UP, 2020).