Late twentieth-century Britain offered a similar crowd experience for those standing in stadium terraces watching football. As Bill Buford describes it:
the physicalness was constant; it was inescapable—unless you literally escaped by leaving. You could feel, and you had no choice but to feel, every important moment of play—through the crowd. A shot on goal was a felt experience. With each effort, the crowd audibly drew in its breath, and then, after another athletic save, exhaled with equal exaggeration. And each time the people around me expanded, their rib cages noticeably inflating, and we were pressed more closely together. They had tensed up—their arm muscles flexed slightly and their bodies stiffened, or they might stretch their necks forward, trying to determine in the strange, shadowless electronic night-light if this shot was the shot that would result in a goal. You could feel the anticipation of the crowd on all sides of your body as a series of sensations.<sup>3</sup>
Buford attempts to understand the violence of English football fans, a violence not only of fighting (beating, kicking, knifing) and property damage (smashing, burning, throwing), but also of crush, stampede, collapse, and suffocation. Crowd violence is more a product of design, architecture, patterns of ticketing and transportation than it is a spontaneous expression of anger.
A crowd forms in a place. It depends on the boundedness of a setting to concentrate its intensity. On the one hand, the boundaries demarcate the permissible: “the crowd can be here, but not there.”<sup>4</sup> They establish the divisions that en-form the crowd. On the other, these very limits invite transgression, directing the crowd’s attention. They provide the thresholds that, once crossed, enable the crowd to feel its strength and renew its assertion of power. Buford attends to this crowd feeling, the exhilarating moment when a sense of individuality is obliterated as all the mediators of social interchange that maintain our separateness give way to the “jubilant authority of suddenly being in a crowd.”<sup>5</sup> Charge, atmosphere, pressure, expectation, excitement: the affective sensibility of the collective becomes desirable in itself, the shared sense of the power of numbers. This sense lets us construe the crowd as the positivity of negation, a positive expression of the negation of individuality, separateness, boundaries, and limit.
The Egalitarian Discharge
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