Too many castigate the crowd for its destructiveness without looking into why the crowd destroys. Canetti associates destructiveness with the discharge, almost as if the crowd were crying out in ecstasy: “the noise of destruction adds to its satisfaction.” Sounds of shattering glass augment the jubilation of the crowd, testifying to its strength prolonging enjoyment by promising continued growth and movement: “the din is the applause of objects.”<sup>11</sup> Particularly satisfying is the destruction of boundaries. Nothing is off limits because there are no limits. The windows and doors that make houses into separate spaces, spaces for individuals apart from the crowd, are smashed.
In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries.<sup>12</sup>
Canetti’s crowd desires. It wants to grow, to increase and spread. It will persist as long as it is moving toward a goal. In addition to equality and density, then, Canetti attributes to crowds traits suggestive of what psychoanalysis treats as desire: growth and direction. The urge to increase is a push to be more, to eliminate barriers, to universalize and extend the crowd feeling such that nothing is outside it. Direction intensifies equality by providing a common goal. If the crowd is to continue to exist, the goal must remain unattained. Expressed in Lacanian terms: desire is a desire to desire.
In the contemporary United States, political crowds, crowds authorized by neither capital nor the state, rarely manifest out of doors. Increase seems a desire limited to capital. 2011 was a year of hope and disruption because protesters from Madison, Wisconsin and then the multiple Occupy encampments shot a hole in the wall of expectations that enabled us to glimpse radical collective possibilities. For the most part, though, political crowds occur elsewhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, even Canada. The December 2, 2013 headlines for the news program Democracy Now! expressed this status quo as they highlighted the thousands demonstrating in the occupied territories against potential Israeli expulsion of Bedouin Arabs, the thousands rallying in Honduras for an election recall, the tens of thousands protesting in Mexico against their president, the hundreds of thousands in Ukraine protesting the government’s refusal to boost ties to the EU, and the “Republican Tweet Mocked for Racist Claim.” The Republican National Committee had tweeted a photo of Rosa Parks with the message: “Today we honor Rosa Park’s bold stand and her role in ending racism.” Thousands retweeted it with the hashtag #RacismEndedWhen.
In the Democracy Now! headlines, domestic social media snark, contained in and channeled through networked communications, appears at the same level as mass protests in other countries as if to stand in for the missing crowd, the many invoked in terms like “crowd-sourcing.” Yet again political energy is captured in communicative capitalism’s circuits of drive. But this contained and limited media moment still indicates the necessity of the crowd for politics. The millions of repetitions under a common name—marked by the hashtag—push back against the Republican Party’s rebranding efforts, demonstrating its failure to comprehend ongoing racism in the US. For a little while, the Twitter crowd turns lack into a common object. They disorder the Republican social media plan, their intrusion via a common name denegating the minimal difference of communicative capitalism’s personalized media. Their force comes from their provisional being-many-as-one—until it is swept back into the engulfing media flow. Even here, even in communicative capitalism’s virtual crowds, we can glimpse an expression of crowd desire, a desire irreducible to either a specific object or specific individuals counted up as the force of their aggregation counts for nothing. Social media is thus a second site of permissible, laudable increase: everyone wants more friends, forwards, and followers.
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