{"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":58,"pdf_page":57,"physical_index":57,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7f35a2f23cfbc24c7988de36bb7067b8fe2f937db25ede491c5b0b45f66213fa"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"There is politics because the political subject is collective and it is split. This split is practical and material, the condition of our physical being. The people can never be politically (or, differently put, the “people” is not an ontological category). They are only present as parts, as subsets. This is the case with crowds occupying public squares, elected assemblies, armies in battle, and opinion polls. All are necessarily parts. Their partiality—the gap between parts and (imaginary) whole—is the exciting cause of political subjectivization. Moreover, even as parts, the people are only present temporarily. They may try to inscribe their presence, their having been, in documents, practices, and organizations which will take their place and operate in their stead, a taking and operating which is also and unavoidably partial. Some degree of alienation is unavoidable: making something ourselves, building collectives, creating new institutions cannot eliminate the minimal difference between the collectivity and the people. The condition of politics, then, is this practical material split between the people and the collective that actually comes together. Expressed in Rousseauian terms: the general will does not follow from the will of all.\n\nThe split in the people is also an effect of the group on its members in the sense that the people are never fully identical with their sovereignty. Groupness exerts a force that is more than the sum of individual expectation. The expectations of groups work back upon their members. People have them of each other as well as of themselves, and they have them of each other and themselves in ways of which they are never fully conscious. This excess manifests itself in the point of reference from which a collectivity views itself as a collective, a point sometimes occupied by a leader or held in place by a proper or common name. A name forces a gap in the collectivity it names, inscribing the non-all character of the collectivity and providing a new terrain of struggle: we argue over the name. The common name can never fully designate—capture and enclose—the collectivity even as the collectivity cannot relate to itself absent a structuring form.<sup>45</sup>\n\nThe split in the people goes all the way down. It can’t be limited to the idea that some are excluded from the people (and hence that including them would solve the problem of the gap). Nor can it be rendered as the problem of representation (and hence addressed via ontology). Rather, the people do not know what they want. They are not fully present to themselves. Conflicting and contradictory desires and drives render the people a split subject perpetually pushing to express, encounter, and address its own non-knowledge. Returning to the idea given by Žižek and Dolar, as the collective subject of politics the people is nothing but this gap.\n\nI have proposed an inversion of the Althusserian account of ideology and suggested some of the conceptual benefits that accompany it. An understanding of the subject as interpellated as an individual resonates with linguistic ideas of the subject, better fits with Althusser’s own description of ideological recruitment, and attends to the historicity of the individual in bourgeois modernity.<sup>46</sup> Even more, it lets us begin to explore the gaps constitutive of collective subjectivity and thereby further loosen the grip of the individual form. Insofar as he fails to uncouple subject and individual and consider the crowd out of which the hailed individual is recruited, Althusser naturalizes enclosure. To be sure, he is working on the terrain of a psychoanalysis that has already enclosed the collective subject in the individual form. If we turn to Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, we can see how this enclosing is accomplished. There Freud presents the individual form as a product of the enclosure of the crowd.<sup>47</sup> A return to Freud, and to his primary interlocutor in Group Psychology, the notorious Gustave Le Bon, reanimates the crowd as it highlights the displacement of many by one. Attending to this crowd contributes to the dismantling of the phantom-like subjectivity of the individual by locating in the crowd the dynamics of a collective subject.\n\n58","previous_page":57,"next_page":59}