Spinoza and the Literature of Crowds

Fiction tends to be constructed around individuals, yet some writers are most interested in what happens when individuality begins to blur. A crowd can become frightened, jubilant, cruel, ecstatic, or violent with a speed no single person seems to control. A city can seem to possess a mood. A political rally, a riot, a religious procession, or a busy street can generate emotional forces that move through people before they have time to interpret them.

This is one reason the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza can be so useful for thinking about literature. Spinoza does not imagine human beings as isolated minds who occasionally interact with one another. We are constantly affecting and being affected by the world around us. Our encounters alter what we are capable of feeling and doing.

For Spinoza, an affect is not simply an emotion sealed inside a person. It is a change in a person's capacity to act. An encounter can increase that capacity or diminish it. Joy, in this sense, involves an expansion of power; sadness involves a contraction. Human beings are therefore relational creatures. We become different in the presence of other people.

Literature has always known this, even when it has used different terminology. Take, for example, the crowds of Charles Dickens. London in novels such as Bleak House or A Tale of Two Cities exerts its own kind of pressure. Rumor moves through the streets. Fear becomes contagious. Social systems produce forms of anxiety and desire that no single character could create. During scenes of collective unrest, people behave differently together than they would alone.

Émile Zola pushes this even further. In novels such as Germinal, individual workers suffer particular injuries and injustices, but their anger becomes politically consequential when it begins to circulate. The strike is more than the sum of the workers who participate in it. Hunger, humiliation, solidarity, and rage pass from body to body until the group begins to act almost like an organism. A Spinozist reading asks us to notice that agency is never completely private. 

Virginia Woolf provides a very different version of the same phenomenon. In Mrs Dalloway, London is filled with fleeting encounters between strangers who may never speak to one another. A car backfires. An airplane writes in the sky. People stop and look. For a few moments, separate consciousnesses become oriented toward the same event.

These moments are easy to overlook because little seems to happen. Yet Woolf reveals something fundamental about social life. People continually enter one another's perceptual fields. A sound changes the attention of an entire street. A gesture is observed by someone who will never understand its meaning. Individual consciousness remains private, but experience is simultaneously collective.

John Dos Passos approached this problem formally. The collage structure of the U.S.A. trilogy moves freely among characters, headlines, popular songs, biographies, advertising language, and fragments of public discourse. The technique suggests that consciousness is never formed entirely from within. Political slogans, commercial language, mass media, and collective memory flow through the individual.

The literature of crowds therefore raises a useful craft question: where exactly does character end and environment begin? Writers sometimes treat setting as a container. First they describe the place, and then the real action begins between the characters. But a more relational approach asks how the environment is actively changing those characters.

Writing collective scenes well is difficult precisely because they require the author to manage several scales at once. Too much distance and the crowd becomes abstract. Too much attention to a single character and the collective force disappears. A book writing consultant reading an entire manuscript can notice patterns that are difficult to see at the sentence level. They might recognize that a novel claims to be about a community while almost every scene remains psychologically isolated, or that a political movement exists primarily as exposition rather than as something characters physically experience.

A good consultant can also help a writer examine how social pressure operates across a book. Which characters become more powerful in groups? Which become diminished? How does a family, institution, neighborhood, or political movement change what an individual believes is possible? These questions can reveal structural possibilities as well as problems of characterization.

Spinoza offers writers a way of thinking beyond the lonely consciousness. We are not simply people who possess emotions and then carry them into the world. Our encounters with others continually alter those emotions, our perceptions, and our capacities for action. Fiction becomes especially interesting when it captures this traffic between the individual and the collective. A person enters a crowd and changes it slightly. The crowd changes the person in return.