{"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":76,"pdf_page":75,"physical_index":75,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8c52f6ed3780f5bb13bcccea1c1d0bba9c597429aa647edc6857c825e6812ef3"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Le Bon doesn’t theorize crowd desire. He takes it as a given, enfolding it in the masses’ determination to destroy society and restore primitive communism. Crowd desire is inseparable from the will to collectivity formed out of its provisional being. The crowd phenomena that interest Le Bon define a new political era of mass political involvement. The very fact that crowds amass, that the people can be seen as having left their proper place, disrupts one social order and creates the possibility of another. What the people desire is less significant than the fact that they desire. Crowd desire registers in the concentration that negates, in the positivity of a negation of the boundaries and separations ordering social being.\n\nCrowd observers and commentators generally react to large political crowds with combinations of anxiety and enthusiasm. Social order disrupted, anything can happen. Exemplary here is Hyppolite Taine’s account of crowds in the French Revolution. Written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, Taine’s portrayal influenced Le Bon. It continues to serve as a prototype for crowd description. We hear its echo in contemporary reports of riots. Taine describes a tumultuous buzzing swarm. “The starving, the ruffians, and the patriots all form one body, and henceforth misery, crime, and public spirit unite to provide an ever-ready insurrection for the agitators who desire to raise one.”<sup>1</sup> Taine’s crowd doesn’t have a politics. It’s an opportunity for politics. Need, violence and a sense of justice reinforce each other. The crowd manifests the desire of the people, but without telling us what it’s for, telling us instead that it can never be one thing, never one and never a thing, that until it is dispersed it will remain beyond satisfaction. Taine ventriloquizes in advance twenty-first-century internet commentary:\n\nIn this pell-mell of improvised politicians, no one knows who is speaking; nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the theatre, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational impressions and transports, a prey to the contagion of passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made news, growing rumours, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep outdoing each other.<sup>2</sup>\n\nHere in the upheaval of the political crowd there is no clear or singular demand, no person of known responsibility. The setting is one of rumor without knowledge and rhetoric without basis. People in the crowd are speaking, and their collective desire exceeds what is individually spoken.\n\nIn the contemporary United States, it could seem that what the people desire most are cheap consumer goods. Our most prevalent image of crowds is that of Black Friday shoppers surging through the doors of Walmart. Ubiquitous screens feature chaotic hordes cohering through the concentration of personal wants for things before the closed doors of big box stores, but nothing that looks much like collective desire. In these crowd images, capitalism formats our setting so that only consumers and commodities appear, the consumers welded into a single mass through the erasure of social space, the commodities now so desirable as to have been magically able to effect this erasure. A fantasy of demands that goods can satisfy occupies the place of the object of collective desire. Black Friday shoppers know the role they play. Decades of media coverage have made that clear enough with interviews of bargain hunters braving bitter cold and long lines, excited in the press of bodies against glass and desperate enough to punch, kick, and grab in this scene of shopping staged as looting. That someone might be trampled to death adds to the thrill of the stampede of capitalist enthusiasm. The form of crowd action that capital expects in these spectacles of consumption—wait, press, rush—has been well established, scripted to generate a crowd energy that capital can direct and exploit.\n\n76","previous_page":75,"next_page":77}