{"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":62,"pdf_page":61,"physical_index":61,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8cf13262b2e85f6e08762494a6beaa8722ea8d10e775f385ff52addf9f59d8ac"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"There is much to admire in Borch-Jacobsen’s reading. I want to note where mine diverges from his. Rather than attending to the two different senses of the unconscious as a crowd in Freud, Borch-Jacobsen absorbs the dynamic in the structural. He treats the crowd unconscious (for Le Bon and Freud) as a womb, “a soft, malleable, plastic, infinitely receptive material without will or desire or any specific instinct of its own.”<sup>72</sup> Crowd as “matrical mass” fits with Borch-Jacobsen’s emphasis on the imaginary. It also fits with his critique of Freud insofar as Freud attempts to enclose the crowd within the form of the individual. The problem, however, is that neither Le Bon nor Freud presents the crowd as infinitely receptive and incapable of desire. Le Bon notes that influencing the crowd takes skill; the crowd senses its own strength and is thus intolerant of contradiction in those who speak before it.<sup>73</sup> Since neither truth nor argument make a difference to crowds (they are not infinitely receptive), Le Bon emphasizes affirmation, repetition, and contagion as more promising methods of influence. Likewise Freud says that the crowd “may desire things passionately” and that it can tolerate no delay “between its desire and the fulfillment of what it desires.”<sup>74</sup> His primary argument is that crowds are tied together libidinally; they are products of desire. In short, the unconscious processes associated with the crowd are more subjectal than Borch-Jacobsen acknowledges. The collectivity desires and wills, destroys and creates. These attributes precede Freud’s attempts to contain them in the unconscious of an individual whose own becoming-subject is contingent upon this containment.\n\nDolar advances beyond Borch-Jacobsen when he suggests that the unconscious as Freud describes it in Group Psychology takes place between the individual and the collective, “in the very establishment of the ties between an individual (becoming a subject) and a group to which s/he would belong.”<sup>75</sup> Dolar declines to read Freud in terms of a collective unconscious because that “would demand a defined collectivity, a community to which it would pertain, but no such pre-given community exists.” Because Le Bon’s crowds are heterogeneous as well as homogeneous, criminal as well as moral, forming a collective mind “doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics,” however, I see no reason to presume a “defined collectivity.”<sup>76</sup> “Defined collectivity” implies a collectivity that is known and inscribed rather than crowd characteristics, dynamics, and attributes that are themselves definable. It suggests bounded groups rather than momentary collectivities formed through a concentration of forces the exciting causes of which can only be retroactively determined. In Group Psychology, the unconscious is nothing but collective, an insight Freud attempts repeatedly to repress by enclosing its processes in an individual form never adequate to its task. Psychoanalysis as a field is possible and can contribute to the debates in crowd theory because the dynamics it investigates are already collective even as they are enclosed in the generic form of the individual.\n\n62","previous_page":61,"next_page":63}