La freccia e il cerchio
anno 6, numero 6, 2015
pp. 175-177

Sergio Brancato
Numbers, series, destinies

   A plausible point of departure for a reflection on numbers and destiny in the contemporary age and in the sociologically more precise field of the great mass narratives can be identified in the fecundity of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. This great anomalous father of Sociology – so anomalous that today, at least in Italy, his affiliation with the Sociology community would probably not be recognized – wrote this in 1937: “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. (…) The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. (…) Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace. (…) Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art”.
   This long passage, obviously a series of quotes from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction centers on a phrase that apparently slips by without notice in the context of Benjamin’s powerful narrative structure, that is, when he clearly claims that “quantity has been transmuted into quality”. At any rate, this affirmation is at the heart of the Benjamin’s claims about art and on the processes of mechanization of existence, on the start of an idea of society founded on the meaningfulness of numbers. While the negative utopias of post-romantic literature started to design scenarios of dehumanized life (identifying a point of epic catastrophe in the culture of humanism), science and the pragmatics of politics began to build interpretive models of the social reality wholly founded on the capacity of numbers to restore hypotheses of interpretation of the anthropological habitat and the administrative intervention on it. Market research and statistical methods have reduced, for many scholars, the community spirit to a question of percentages.
   That period saw the creation of a durable mixture of myths set against modern individualism and the “dictatorship” of data, a semantic intersection that is magnificently expressed in the definition of man-mass, and an authentic oxymoron that was quite successful in the sociological literature of a century ago. The connection that must be recognized – tending to the exaltation of the individual as well as the feared reduction to mere statistical data – is that of number and mass: the arrival of the industrial world passes for a radical overturning of the historical perspective due to the sudden appearance of a new protagonist on the social scene, precisely the metropolitan masses Baudelaire wrote about in his work about Paris. In the pages of Paris Spleen, the poet restores the sentiment of uneasiness and estrangement he felt when observing the crowds moving about on the boulevards of the capital in the 19th century. The great number of human beings that converged on the city as a consequence of the process of industrialization caused substantial transformations in the modus vivendi, analogous to the great changes that Machiavelli described nearly five hundred years previously in the pages of The Prince, grasping the innovative spirit of Humanism. The era of the factory leads the sphere of modern politics to its extreme ends, as the theories and even the slogans of totalitarian regimes attest: there is power in numbers!, would be shouted to promote the demographic campaigns that in the following century would combine the concept of quantity to the destiny of the country.
   The demographics are also one of the useful keys for introducing us to the concept of massification, therefore of that vast process that belongs to the industrial society and defines its character and aesthetics. Above all in the modern age, the theme of quantity used in reference to the people becomes essential for thinking about the world. Numbering the population through the census bureau is one of the first big reforms that have characterized modern countries. Even though many words have been used to define this dynamic (people/s, crowd/s, mass/es, etc.), the unifying fact lies in the need to apply a new principle of order in a social phenomenon that is so fluid and complex, that in just a few years transforms the appearance of the known world. The problem to deal with is to rationalize the relationship with the multitudes of human beings just as scientists proceed with natural phenomena. It is not by chance that the first name chosen for the disciplinary corpus of what is known today as sociology, thanks to Comte, was “social physics”.
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