{"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":12,"pdf_page":11,"physical_index":11,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d6ee4f6eb4f1170fa9e442fc0dca2bd54171ad92fda95f68f2981762dcc22605"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Resisting for a while the urge to classify crowds in terms of a pre-given political content enables us to consider crowds in terms of their dynamics. Crowds are more than large numbers of people concentrated in a location. They are effects of collectivity, the influence—whether conscious, affective, or unconscious—of others.<sup>11</sup> Contemporary social science analyzes these effects with terms like “band-wagoning,” “bubbles,” and “information cascades.” Mainstream commentary continues to use terms from earlier crowd theory: “imitation,” “suggestion,” and “contagion.”\n\nThe most influential early crowd theorist is Gustave Le Bon. His widely reprinted and translated book, The Crowd: A Study ofthe Popular Mind, laid the groundwork for twentieth-century theorization of crowds. I engage Sigmund Freud’s take up of Le Bon as Freud formulates a psychoanalytic theory of group psychology. Benito Mussolini also found Le Bon inspiring, particularly Le Bon’s discussion of the leader.<sup>12</sup> But we need not follow Mussolini into such a narrow focus. The emphasis on the leader displaces our attention from what is ingenious in Le Bon’s notion of the crowd, namely, his rendering of the crowd as a “provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements.”\n\nLe Bon presents the crowd as a distinct form of collectivity. The crowd is not a community. It doesn’t rely on traditions. It doesn’t have a history. The crowd is not held together by unstated norms or an obscene supplement that extends beyond its own immediacy (although crowd images and symbols clearly shape the reception and circulation of crowd events).<sup>13</sup> Rather, the crowd is a temporary collective being. It holds itself together affectively via imitation, contagion, suggestion, and a sense of its own invincibility. Because the crowd is a collective being, it cannot be reduced to singularities. On the contrary, the primary characteristic of a crowd is its operation as a force of its own, like an organism. The crowd is more than an aggregate of individuals. It is individuals changed through the torsion of their aggregation, the force aggregation exerts back on them to do together what is impossible alone.\n\nThe democratic claim for the crowd was powerful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Democracy could name an opposition. Even as communists registered the limits of bourgeois democracy in its use as an instrument of capitalist class rule, democracy could still register a challenge to existing structures of power. In the twentyfirst century, however, dominant nation-states exercise power as democracies. They bomb and invade as democracies for democracy’s sake. International political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic, as do the contradictory entangled media practices of communicative capitalism.<sup>14</sup> When crowds amass in opposition, they poise themselves against democratic practices, systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political setting of the crowd.\n\nDemocratic governments justify themselves as rule by the people. When crowds gather in opposition, they expose the limits of this justification. The will of the majority expressed in elections stops appearing as the will of the people. That not-all of the people support this government or those decisions becomes openly, physically, intensely manifest.<sup>15</sup> Disagreement and opposition start to do more than circulate as particular contributions to the production of nuggets of shareable outrage in the never-ending flow of clickbait in which we drown one another. They index collective power, the affective generativity that exceeds individual opinions. Many press back, using the strength of embodied number to install a gap in the dominant order. They make apparent its biases, compromises, and underlying investments in protecting the processes through which the capitalist class accumulates wealth. They expose the fragility of the separations and boxes upholding electoral politics. The crowd reclaims for the people the political field democracy would try to fragment and manage.\n\n12","previous_page":11,"next_page":13}