{"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":135,"pdf_page":134,"physical_index":134,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1d2a228e7b4860fd3577682214b274d2da5d35d5783f8d0a096323d57b501a09"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Canetti’s crowd processes resemble psychoanalytic dynamics of desire and drive. Growth and direction point outwards. Equality and density turn back in. Together they form the knot of intensities I am referring to as the crowd unconscious. The crowd isn’t structured like a language. It isn’t a discursive formation. Rather, it’s the dynamic press of many, the force exerted by collectivity. It doesn’t have a politics any more than does an anthill, forest, or heap of stones. Canetti’s crowds include dancing warriors and swarms of insects, spermatozoa and the dead, production and inflation. The real press of many takes and disrupts multiple forms: material, institutional, imaginary, symbolic. It also occurs in varying temporalities: quick or slow, momentary or enduring. The multiplicity of forms and tempos overlap and intersect, flowing together into a crowd of crowds. What the crowd wants most of all—what it lacks—is endurance.\n\nCanetti writes: “The tendency of all human crowds to become more and more—the blind, reckless, dynamic movement which sacrifices everything to itself and which is always present in a gathering crowd—this tendency is transferable.”<sup>5</sup> He doesn’t explicate the concept. Instead he gives multiple examples: hunters transfer the growth tendency to their prey, farmers transfer it to their crops, modern Europeans transfer it to money, using the word “million” as the basic unit for counting population and money “the abstract number has become filled with a crowd-meaning contained by no other number today.”<sup>6</sup> The mechanisms of transference matter little to Canetti. He blurs together rituals, symbols, and processes. All enable the transmission or displacement of the crowd’s desire to increase from the crowd onto something else. Wheat, mountains, and sea can become crowd symbols because they can carry the desire for increase.\n\nPractical Optimism\n\nAlthough Canetti doesn’t make this point, the party, too, can carry the desire for increase as well as other attributes of the crowd unconscious. As it gathers and generates power, the party, especially the communist party, operates as a transferential object—a symbol and combination of rituals and processes—for the collective action of the many.\n\nThe crowd wants to endure. The party provides an apparatus for this endurance. Marxist discussions of the party typically focus on the organizational and ideological aspects of the party apparatus: vanguard versus mass, covert versus legal, revolutionary versus reformist. Left out is the affective infrastructure of the party, its reconfiguration of the crowd unconsciousness into a political form. Gavin Walker shifts discussion toward this reconfiguration. He describes the party as a “material substratum” that “allows the reverberations or ‘overtone’ of the event to remain at the core of a consistency.”<sup>7</sup> As the body that turns the subjectivizing crowd event into a moment in a subjective process of politicizing the people, the party is tasked with transmitting the event’s overtone. It can’t simply declare an event to be an action of the heroic working class or revolutionary people. The party has to defend this declaration in a hostile setting. Even more, it has to ensure its truth, conducing the affective intensity of the crowd discharge in the wake of its dissipation.\n\n135","previous_page":134,"next_page":136}