Crowds and Party · 第 44 页

One might object that Canetti’s crowd is physical and the networked crowd is virtual. This objection is compelling—part of the power of the occupations of Tahrir Square, Syntagma Square, and the Occupy movement’s multiple parks and sites came from the force of bodies out of doors in collectivities authorized by neither capital nor the state. But the objection implies a distinction between the physical and the virtual that crowd theory consistently destabilizes. Most crowd theorists attend to physical and virtual crowds. They draw out “crowd” as a verb, as dynamics, and as affects that traverse and constitute collectivity. Canetti himself describes invisible crowds of the dead and spermatozoa. As I detail in the next chapter, Gustave Le Bon’s influential (albeit notoriously reactionary) work on crowds treats the crowd primarily as a psychological concept. Le Bon goes so far as to claim enigmatically that “crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.”⁶³ Furthermore, technologies of presencing have developed so as to make our mediated interactions feel all the more present and intense. We are interacting with others, not just screens. When we register trending hashtags and multishared stories, we experience the force of many. In social media, the many flow across our screens, waves of images and expressions of feeling with effects that accumulate, resonate, and consolidate into patterns irreducible to any particular position or utterance. Canetti notes “how gladly one falls prey to the crowd.”⁶⁴ The crowd, virtual and physical, moves and intoxicates. Canetti writes, “you were lost, you forgot yourself, you felt tremendously remote and yet fulfilled; whatever you felt, you didn’t feel it for yourself; it was the most selfless thing you knew; and since selfishness was shown, talked, and threatened on all sides, you needed this experience of thunderous unselfishness like the blast of the trumpet at the Last Judgment.”⁶⁵ The experience of flow that overwhelms the conscious experience of self that Turkle finds so threatening, then, might also be understood as a breaking out of the illusion that the individual is and can be a subject of action (rather than a form of enclosure and containment) and a giving-over to a crowd.

We’ve Got to Be We

The crumbling of capitalist realism—the shaking off of Margaret Thatcher’s destructive mantra that “there is no alternative” to unfettered capitalist competition—has led to mainstream acknowledgement that capitalism is a system that takes from the many and gives to the few.⁶⁶ Today no one denies the fact that some always lose in the capitalist economy. The system produces losers—the unemployed, the homeless, the indebted, the conned, the wiped out, the abandoned, the sacrificed. It runs on debt, foreclosure, expropriation, eviction, dispossession, destruction—these are just other words for privatization. But then what? Ever since the Left started looking at itself and the world in terms of individual specificity and the efficiency of markets, it has seemed easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine an organized Left.

44