{"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":88,"pdf_page":87,"physical_index":87,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4c998a9e64475e500ce146dcd923ad615592f7cdff933e194e42294925c78e2e"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"In a setting where networked personalized media devices tether us to work without end, where our consumer activities are traced, bundled, and resold as so much searchable data, and where the achievements of middle-class, bourgeois life have collapsed in a proletarianization of the waged and indebted who confront new and extreme forms of inequality, an erasure of boundaries looks more like capitalist real subsumption than it does the revolutionary praxis of the oppressed. Ross’s own categories further the diminution of questions of capital and labor: she wants to diminish this opposition so that other sites of politics can appear. Retroactively, this diminution is the gesture of capitalist restoration enacted under the heading of neoliberalism. The redirection of politics throughout cultural spheres and specific conflicts was the form of its dispersion into loci capital could more easily swallow. The enclosure of politics in individuals was the index of working-class defeat. Ross gives us revolution in and as a form already captured by capitalism, easily dispersed throughout fantasies of the power of creativity to transform individuals.\n\nRoss’s account of the Commune is also an account of the crowd.<sup>41</sup> Her nuanced reading of the crowd in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud opens up the possibility of repeating the move she makes with Marx and using Ross against Ross. Ross brings out the ways Rimbaud’s poems render the crowd as a swarm. Some ways are acoustic: the distant drone, an indistinct buzzing that reverberates in the background, “the frantic, busy immobility of latency,” the rustling of trees, of material against itself, and of stars, the murmur of agitation sweeping through a crowd. Others are tactile: “the sensation of being covered with enormous swarms of tiny insects,” the “awakening of the colonies of the skin,” “the dispersion of the body’s surface into a thousand microsensations.” Still others are lexical, fantastic juxtapositions of words (such as “rustling stars”) in a “swarm of relations” suggesting “the premonition of a change in the relations of elements to each other.”<sup>42</sup> For Ross, treatments of Rimbaud as a poet of sensation generalize a more specific feature of his poetry: the erotic as “predicated on the effectuation of the power of the crowd, a power both destructive and generative.”<sup>43</sup> The crowd decomposes the body, making the body itself become a crowd, “as if it were peopled by multiplicities.”\n\nRoss links Rimbaud’s crowd to changes at the level of the individual. The crowd effects a de-individuation “that signals a devaluation of individual subjectivity in favor of the construction of a (virtual) group subject.”<sup>44</sup> She continues: “something is happening that cannot be seized without letting go of the power to say ‘I.’” I don’t know why Ross includes “virtual” parenthetically. I suspect that it has something to do with her critique of the “mature” Marx and her rejection of class politics. Ross is looking for a subjectivity emancipated from the confines of bourgeois life, the structured expectations of capitalism, and the “ordered disorganization” of consumer culture. She associates this subjectivity with “the anarchist notion of individual liberty, of individuality” against capitalist individualism (italics in original).<sup>45</sup> Ross wants to affirm this anarchist individuality, to retain it as a locus of emancipation over and against a Marxist emphasis on work. The problem of capitalism in this view isn’t the exploitation of some for the enjoyment of others; it’s the violence done to individuality. Capitalism commodifies and anonymizes. It dulls perception, enclosing desire into a narrowness fit only for work and consumption. Rimbaud’s poetry multiplies the senses in order to break the hold of capitalism on the individualized body. It offers the “morethan-human” of the “transformed utopian body of infinite sensation and libidinal possibility as figure for the perfected community, for associative or collective life.”<sup>46</sup> The group subject is virtual because it is a marker for a potential collectivity of unlimited individuality.\n\n88","previous_page":87,"next_page":89}