A quarter century since Ross’s initial publication of her reading of Rimbaud, emphases on individuality and potentiality resonate less with freedom than they do with the dominion of capital. Individuality is communicative capitalism’s primary value. We are told that each of us is unique, and enjoined to amplify, advertise, and accelerate this uniqueness. Our media is personalized, and we are encouraged to personalize it even more, for example, with apps and mobile phone cases that meet our singular needs and express our singular brands. Those looking for work are advised to make themselves stand out from the crowd, to distinguish themselves from others by offering that special something that will catch an employer’s eye. Capital accumulation depends on cultivating and monetizing the new and different. In an informational milieu in which images and events are quickly absorbed in an infinite media flow, attracting and retaining attention is extraordinarily difficult. Social media experts and data analytics attempt to harvest and harness future possibilities, reminding us that coming up with a unique personal brand, getting noticed, getting heard is no simple matter. “Potential” is entrepreneurial buzzword and securitizable wager. Corporations capture it and hedge funds bet on its algorithmic variations. Individuality and potentiality point less to new experiences of freedom than to new means of entrapment within capitalist circuits.
When the group marks only the potential of unlimited individuality, it loses its political efficacy. It fails to make division appear, covering it over with the unifying screen of multiplicity.<sup>47</sup> In Ross’s version embodied sensation replaces the collective body of the working class. Crowd affect displaces militant political association.
At the same time, Ross’s insights into Rimbaud’s figuring of the crowd suggest another reading of the crowd, one that treats the devaluation of individual subjectivity as a component of a process of collective subjectivization. Something is happening such that the capacity to say “I” is being replaced by the will to say “we.” This something is the crowd effect rupturing the individual form. In another parenthetical, Ross writes:
the anonymous, blurry face in the crowd, the “man in the street,” as we say, is always one step away from becoming “people in the streets”: the crowd, the demonstration, the insurrection. The man in the street, the indistinct element in a swarm of people, stripped of individual subjectivity, faceless, is always on the point of becoming “political man,” always just at the limit of action. 48
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