{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":113,"pdf_page":112,"physical_index":112,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2bdf45f06af276848fd2750b8e5f2bb21724946989761b696b9c0d59b49b64be"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Mind the Gap\n\nPsychoanalysis helps us understand this gap. It can let us see why the division between few and many should not be solidified as a division between real and ideal, pragmatic and utopian, but acknowledged instead as a constitutive, enabling split: impossibility is the condition of possibility for communist politics. The non-identity between people and party is what enables each to be more and less than what they are, for each to enable, rupture, and exceed the other. Michels specifies this gap as the crowd’s missing capacity supplied by the leader and the working class’s missing consciousness supplied by the bourgeois deserters. Acknowledging that these technical provisions remain incomplete, that organization is more than an instrument, he supplements them by attending to the psychological tendencies of crowds. As gratitude, prestige, imitation, and identification demonstrate, leaders are means through which the crowd can feel and enjoy itself. Michels’s own gestures to the unconscious thus provide an entry point for psychoanalysis.\n\nLacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap, a gap where something happens but remains unrealized.<sup>47</sup> It’s not that this something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealized makes itself felt; it exerts a pressure. The communist party is a political form for the press of the unrealized struggles of the people, enabling the concentrating and directing of this press in one way rather than another.\n\nThat the subject of politics is collective means that its actions cannot be reduced to those associated with individual agency, actions like choice or decision. Instead, as chapter three argues, the collective subject impresses itself through ruptures and breaks and the retroactive attribution of these breaks to the subject they expressed. The punctuality of the subject could suggest that it is only evental, only disruptive, utterly disconnected from any body, creation, institution, or advance and thus without substance or content. But this would ignore the persistence of the subject in the press of the unrealized. This persistence needs a body, a carrier. Without a carrier, it dissipates into the manifold of potentiality. Nevertheless, with a carrier some potentiality is diminished. Some possibility is eliminated. Some closure is effected. This loss is the subject’s condition of possibility, the division constitutive of subjectivity. Political forms—parties, states, guerrilla armies, even leaders—situate themselves within this division. Although they can be and often are fetishized (positioned so as to obscure the loss or perfectly remedy it), the fact of fetishization should not deflect from the prior condition of the gap and its occupation.\n\n113","previous_page":112,"next_page":114}