{"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":75,"pdf_page":74,"physical_index":74,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"acd5e340949343affa94814df9fdd41863535f52b107eff7ab0479a8142f7f5d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The People as Subject: Between Crowd and Party\n\nAttention to the disruptive crowd event breaks through the impasse the individual presents to left politics. Signaling the paradoxical power of the people as political subject, the crowd presses forward unexpectedly, then dissipates. We feel the force of many, even as we know they are not all. There are always more. Insistent and opaque, the crowd illuminates attributes of political subjectivity distinctive to the contingent, heterogeneous unity of collectives, attributes missed in mistaken characterizations of the political field as consisting of individuals. Rather than a matter of deliberation, choice, and decision, politics manifests as breaks and gaps, in the unpredictability of an exciting cause, and through collective courage, directed intensity, and capacities to cohere.\n\nThis does not mean, however, that the crowd is a political subject. I argue in this chapter that the crowd rupture is the Real that incites political subjectivization. The crowd is a necessary but incomplete component of political subjectivity, the opening cut by the concentrated push of many, the disruptive power of number. Whether this push will have been an emancipatory egalitarian expression of the people as a collective political subject depends on the party. The crowd is not the people. The crowd is not a political subject. Rather, the people appear as the subject of politics when the rupture of the crowd event can be attributed to them retroactively as an effect of and in fidelity to the egalitarian crowd discharge.\n\nWhat Do Crowds Want?\n\nFrom the preceding chapter’s reading of the notorious Le Bon we gained an opening into political dynamics, affective flows of contagion, suggestion, and imitation that exceed the conscious will of individuals as they form a provisional being out of heterogeneous elements. Crowd phenomena are irreducible to specific “contents,” that is to say, to the ostensible topics or complaints occasioning their emergence. They have dynamics of their own, collective drives and desires. Le Bon presents the political unconscious as the crowd of diverse and indeterminate others to whom we belong and the force this belonging exerts. Sometimes the crowd is physically present. Sometimes it is not.\n\nFreud encloses the crowd’s tumultuous belonging into the fragile yet enduring structure of the psyche. He makes one out of many, losing in the process a capacity to analyze the force of collectivity. Insofar as he treats the crowd as the product of individual desires, Freud nonetheless acquires an ability to say something about collective desire. Group ties form out of an individual’s identification with another through love for a common object.\n\n3\n\n75","previous_page":74,"next_page":76}