{"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":61,"pdf_page":60,"physical_index":60,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ce159418725a2d579218a878b193c98994aece252c2dbded489438392bad0dad"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Le Bon does not view crowds as a mass of bodies in the street. “Crowd” involves a concentration and directionality that encompasses people in a specific place and that extends to a wide array of structured institutions (parliament and jury) and imaginary communities (race and nation). More than a set of social relations, “crowd” for Le Bon is a process (“like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies”) or force in which individuals get caught (“Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes”).61 Early twenty-first century commentators will describe the same phenomena with terms like “cascade effects,” “band-wagoning,” “confirmation bias,” and “bubbles.” Informed by nineteenth-century science, Le Bon affiliates crowd processes with hallucination, barbarism, and the direction of the spinal cord instead of the brain.62 He correlates the strength of these processes with the dangers of crowd power: the “last surviving sovereign force of modern times” and “the only force that nothing menaces.”63\n\nLe Bon conceives the unconscious racially as a hereditary substratum of similarity upon which individual differences are built. The unconscious encompasses a wide array of instincts and passions, affections and aversions, passed down through the generations. Vastly more influential than the mind’s conscious life, the unconscious always threatens to subsume the individual’s independent intellectual aptitudes, themselves the fragile achievements of reason, education, and elite culture. In a crowd, common characteristics overpower the rare achievements of intelligence. Ordinary qualities triumph over distinction and specialization. As Le Bon puts it, these qualities “in crowds become common property.”64 No matter their differences in occupation, intelligence, character, or mode of life, individuals in a crowd possess a collective mind, what Le Bon attributes to the “psychological law of the mental unity of crowds.”65 I should add that anxiety about subjection to the crowd, or, differently put, the fragility of the individual as a form of subjectivity, comes to characterize over a century of inquiry into the crowd, from Durkheim, through Mill, through twentieth-century American sociology’s emphases on the mass and conformity.66\n\nIn Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, Freud treats the unconscious as a crowd in two senses. The first is an analytic or structural sense of the repressed product of history, whether of family or species, as it impresses itself within the individual. Freud commends Le Bon’s discussion of the unconscious because it resonates so well with his own (adding that “as a matter of fact none of the author’s statements bring forward anything new”).67 The second is a more analogical sense where the unconscious is described in terms of the affective dynamics of the crowd. The forces in the unconscious are like the directed intensities of crowd processes. Freud shifts back and forth between these two senses in his attempt to explain the nature of group ties and the emergence of individual from group psychology. These explanations never quite cohere.\n\nMikkel Borch-Jacobsen challenges the Freudian postulate of the unity of the subject of the unconscious, suggesting instead that it is multiple, unascribable, and unidentifiable.68 In a deconstructive reading of psychoanalysis’s binaries of subject and other, desire and object, Borch-Jacobsen draws from René Girard to treat desire as primarily mimetic, positing a “primordial tendency” to identification.69 The details of this discussion exceed my purposes here. What’s compelling, though, is Borch-Jacobsen’s attunement to the ineluctable problem of individuation in psychoanalysis, the problem of being apart when one is always a part. As parts, we remain inextricably interconnected: every attempt to be apart, to separate, involves connection at another point or on another plane.70 Following a nuanced treatment of Freud’s writing on narcissism as symptomatically deploying sexuality in the context of Freud’s own professional rivalries, Borch-Jacobsen turns to Group Psychology. He asks whether Group Psychology is premised on a possibility Freud can’t let himself think and that he has perpetually to displace, namely, that of “a mass-ego, a primordial crowd.”71\n\n61","previous_page":60,"next_page":62}