Abstract:
How are we to understand the phenomenon of mass identification,
epitomised in recent exhibitions of national feeling such as that of South
Africa’s 2010 Football World Cup celebrations? Rather than focusing on
the concepts of discourse and nationalism, or advancing an analysis of
empirical data, this paper outlines a conceptual response to the challenge
at hand, drawing on the tools of psychoanalytic theory. Three explanatory
perspectives come to the fore. Firstly, such exhibitions of mass emotion
might be understood as demonstrations of love, as examples of the libidinal
ties that constitute and consolidate mass identification. Secondly, the
marked artificiality of such displays of emotion and the fact of the ‘externality’
they entail might be seen, paradoxically, to be essential rather than
inauthentic or secondary features of the displays in question. Thirdly, we
might advance, via Lacan, that many of our most powerful emotions
require not only recourse to the field of the inter-subjective, but reference
also to the anonymous, ‘fictional’ framework of available symbolic forms.
