Crowds and Party · 第 78 页

Buford’s depiction of the violent crowds associated with English football supporters repeats key elements of Elias Canetti’s classic work, Crowds and Power. I mentioned in chapter one that Canetti associates the crowd with a primal fear, the fear of being touched, particularly by the strange or unknown. Only in a crowd—the denser the better —is this fear shed. “As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch,” Canetti writes. “Suddenly, it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched.” The crowd provisionally coalesces into its heterogeneous being. Norms of appropriate proximity dissolve. Conventional hierarchies collapse. In place of the distinctions mobilized to produce the individual form, there is a temporary being of multiple mouths, anuses, stomachs, hands, and feet, a being comprised of fold upon fold oftouching skin.

Canetti describes the moment of the crowd’s emergence as the “discharge.” This is the point when “all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.”⁶ Up until that point, there may be a lot of people, but they are not yet that concentration of bodies and affects that is a crowd. Density, though, as it increases, has libidinal effects:

In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself, and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.⁷

Canetti gives us the crowd as a strange attractor ofjouissance, a figure of collective enjoyment.⁸ The libidinal energy of the crowd binds it together for a “blessed moment,” a moment Canetti renders as a “feeling of equality” in the shared intensity of belonging. The feeling won’t last. Inequality will return with the dissipation of the crowd. Very few give up the possessions and associations that separate them (those who do form what Canetti terms “crowd crystals”). But in the orgasmic discharge, “a state of absolute equality” supplants individuating distinctions.⁹

Canetti’s crowd equality has nothing to do with Freud’s imaginary equality of rivals. Nor does it resemble bourgeois equality of the sort Marx excoriates in “The Critique of the Gotha Program.” This is not the formal equality of a common standard applied to different people, objects, or expenditures of labor. Rather, the equality Canetti invokes is one where “a head is a head, an arm is an arm, and the differences between individual heads and arms is irrelevant.”¹⁰ De-individuation accompanies intense belonging. Just as Marx parenthetically notes that unequal individuals “would not be different individuals if they were not unequal,” so does Canetti associate inequality with differentiation, with the siphoning off of the fluid, mobile substance of collectivity into the form of distinct individuals. The force of equality in the crowd breaks down the always fragile and imaginary enclosure of the individual form, enabling the collective to experience its collectivity. Canetti argues that the crowd’s equality infuses all demands for justice. Equality as belonging—not separation, weighing, and measure—is what gives “energy” (Canetti’s term) to the longing for justice. As I argue below, a communist party organizes fidelity to this equality, this justice, this blessed moment of joyous belonging.

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