Crowds and Party

CROWDS

AND PARTY

JUDI DEAN

C R O W D S AN D PA RTY

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CROWDS AND PARTY

J O D I D E AN

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First published by Verso 2016 © Jodi Dean 2016

All rights reserved

The moral rights ofthe author have been asserted

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Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint ofNew Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-694-2 eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-672-0 (US) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-766-6 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press

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For Paul, with love

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Nothing Personal

2 Enclosing the Subject

3 The People as Subject: Between Crowd and Party

4 More Than Many

5 The Passional Dynamics of the Communist Party

Conclusion

Index

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Acknowledgements

Writing is solitary. Thinking is collective. I am grateful to the many who extended the time, support, and critical energy that went into this book. Numerous comrades demonstrated solidarity with my project in multiple ways—alerting me to relevant texts, engaging my arguments in various media, providing new opportunities, pushing me to be clearer, bolder, disagreeing. These include but are not limited to Maria Aristodemou, Darin Barney, Tamara d’Auvergne, Donatella Della Ratta, Liza Featherstone, Jon Flanders, Doug Henwood, Bonnie Honig, Penelope Ironstone, Jason Jones, Andreas Kalyvas, Anna Kornbluh, Regina Kreide, Elena Loizidou, Davide Panagia, Korinna Patelis, Alexei Penzin, Artemy Magun, Joe Mink, Joe Ramsey, Kirsty M. Robertson, Corey Robin, John Seery, Joshua Sperber, Mina Suk, and Phillip Wegner.

I want to thank the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for the Fellowship that enabled me to draft the book’s early chapters. I appreciate the critical responses from the Society’s 2013–2014 Fellows as well as the feedback from the Government Department’s Political Theory Workshop. I am particularly indebted to Jason Frank, Anna-Marie Smith, Jason E. Smith, Becquer Seguin, and Avery Slater for their close readings of these chapters. The Society for the Humanities also provided generous support for the Fall 2013 conference, “Communist Currents,” that I coorganized with Jason Smith and Bruno Bosteels. The conversations in and around this conference, as well as the resulting symposium published in South Atlantic Quarterly, were invaluable critical stimuli for Crowds and Party. Thanks go to Banu Bargu, Aaron Benanav, Bruno Bosteels, George Ciccariello-Maher, Joshua Clover, Susana Draper, James Martel, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Jordana Rosenberg, Alessandro Russo, Anna-Marie Smith, Jason Smith, Alberto Toscano, and Gavin Walker. Thanks as well to Michael Hardt for encouraging and publishing the symposium.

Additional opportunities to present chapter drafts helped me clarify my arguments. Thank you to the organizers, participants, and respondents at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the University of Chicago, the Marxist Literary Group, the New School, and the CUNY Graduate Center and to fellow panelists and interlocutors at the 2015 Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting and American Political Science Annual Meeting. Thanks as well to comrades with Philly Socialists.

Special thanks go to Hannah Dickinson and Rob Maclean for their thoughtful commentaries and suggestions. I am also deeply indebted to James Martel, not just for his close reading of the entire manuscript but also for his ongoing enthusiastic—and critical—engagement with my project. Kian Kenyon-Dean and Sadie Kenyon-Dean continue to inspire and provoke. Finally, I am grateful to Paul A. Passavant for his careful readings, our ongoing discussions, and the form of life we make together.

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Introduction

On October 15, 2011, a massive crowd filled New York’s Times Square. Most were Occupiers, demonstrating in concert with anti-capitalist protests in nine hundred cities around the world. October 15 was also the five-month anniversary of Spain’s movement to occupy the squares. Half a million people came out in Madrid. Riots broke out in Rome. In Times Square, nearly thirty thousand people blocked traffic as mounted police pushed them up against quickly set-up barricades. Tourists caught in the crush joined the Occupiers in chanting “We are the 99 percent.”

I had been separated from my group at Sixth Avenue when police started blocking streets to prevent more people from joining up with the protest. I made my way through to a small traffic island at Broadway and Forty-Third. A couple of shoppers, crammed up against those of us with signs, excitedly asked whether we were going to occupy Times Square. They added that they supported Occupy Wall Street and were glad that someone was finally doing something. Together we booed the police when they dragged off protesters who ventured beyond the barricades.

That fall Occupy Wall Street was the most important thing in the world.¹ Occupations were rising up everywhere.² On the New York City subways, passengers read the Occupy Gazette and the Occupied Wall Street Journal. People praised the Occupiers and condemned the police. We all wondered how far we could go. Would it be, as Adbusters had urged in an initial call for the occupation of Wall Street, our Tahrir moment?

After the Times Square demonstration, many of us proceeded down to Washington Square Park for a general assembly (GA). The general assembly was a primary organizational form during the Occupy movement. Prominent in the Spanish demonstrations and indebted to the horizontalism and autonomy of movement practices in Argentina and Mexico, the GA structures discussion according to democratic egalitarian principles aiming toward consensus. By the time I arrived in Washington Square Park, what looked like a thousand people were sitting in a circle near the park’s center. Multiple police vans lined the curb just outside the park’s fence on lower Fifth Avenue. A few barricades were scattered near the Washington Square Arch. Twenty or thirty police stood around faux-casually. Over the next few hours, they would close in to form a line.

At the GA, people were debating whether we would “take the park.” Some had brought tents and sleeping bags with an eye to spreading the occupation from Zuccotti to Washington Square. Zuccotti Park, renamed “Liberty Square” during the occupation, had rapidly become overcrowded. Although its proximity to Wall Street gave it enormous symbolic value, its location on the edge of New York’s financial district was inconvenient. The local fast food restaurants had been accommodating, even welcoming, but the paucity of nearby toilet and shower facilities was taking its toll on the hundreds of Occupiers sleeping in the park. In contrast, Washington Square Park is next to New York University, close to the New School and Cooper Union, easily reachable by subway, and, all in all, in a popular, visible, heavily trafficked part of the city.

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We knew that Washington Square Park was closing at midnight. We felt the police tightening their line, starting to deny newcomers entry to the park. After the fifteenminute or so breakout session where we talked with those around us about taking the park, we pulled back together as one assembly. Speaker after speaker, amplified by the People’s Mic (where the crowd repeats the words of a speaker so that those who are farther away know what is being said), urged us to take the park. We are many. We outnumber them. We can do it. We must do it. Upraised hands twinkled approval in waves of support round and round the circle. Then, a tall, thin, young man with curly dark hair and a revolutionary look began to speak.

We can take this park!
We can take this park!
We can take this park tonight!
We can take this park tonight!
We can also take this park another night.
We can also take this park another night.
Not everyone may be ready tonight.
Not everyone may be ready tonight.
Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.
Everyone is an autonomous individual.

The mood was broken. The next few speakers also affirmed their individuality, describing some of the problems they would encounter if they had to deal with security from NYU or if they got arrested. We were no longer a “we,” a collective. Asserting ourselves as individuals, we became individuated, concerned first with our own particular preoccupations. Collective strength devolved into the problem of individuals aggregating by choices and interests that may or may not converge. Reducing autonomy to individual decision, we destroyed the freedom of action we had as a crowd.

Crowds and Party comes out of this moment of collective de-subjectivation. Occupy Wall Street foundered against a contradiction at its core. The individualism of its democratic, anarchist, and horizontalist ideological currents undermined the collective power the movement was building. Making collective political action dependent on individual choice, the “theology of consensus” fragmented the provisional unity of the crowd back into disempowered singularities.³ The movement’s decline (which began well before Occupiers were evicted) exposes the impasse confronting the Left. The celebration of autonomous individuality prevents us from foregrounding our commonality and organizing ourselves politically.

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At the same time and together with the global wave of popular unrest, the collective energy of Occupy at its height nevertheless points to an “idea whose time has come.” People are moving together in growing opposition to the policies and practices of states organized in the interest of capital as a class. Crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Through what political forms might we advance? For many of us, the party is emerging as the site of an answer.

Against the presumption that the individual is the fundamental unit of politics, I focus on the crowd. Across the globe, crowds are pressing their opposition and rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. Bringing together thinkers such as Elias Canetti and Alain Badiou, I highlight the “egalitarian discharge” of the crowd event as an intense experience of substantive collectivity. I make fidelity to this event the basis for a new theory of the communist party. Because global movements are themselves pushing us to consider the possibilities in and of the party form, we have to recommence imagining the party of communists.⁴ Who might we be and become as an international revolutionary party again, in our time? To think clearly about these questions, we need to consider the party form unfettered by the false concreteness of specific parties in the contingency of their histories. Liberals and democrats are not the only political theorists who can reflect on their modes of association in the abstract. Communists must do this as well.

As a means of breaking out of the binaries of reform or revolution, mass or vanguard party that historically have inflected discussions of the party form, I approach the function and purpose of the communist party psycho-dynamically. I draw from Robert Michels and Jacques Lacan to think through the affects the party generates and the unconscious processes it mobilizes. The role of the party isn’t to inject knowledge into the working class. Nor is it to represent the interests of the working class on the terrain of politics. Rather, the function of the party is to hold open a gap in our setting so as to enable a collective desire for collectivity.⁵ “Through such a gap or moment,” Daniel Bensaïd writes, “can arise the unaccomplished fact, which contradicts the fatality of the accomplished fact.”⁶ The crowd’s breach of the predictable and given creates the possibility that a political subject might appear. The party steps into that breach and fights to keep it open for the people.

Canetti makes a point I return to throughout the book: crowds come together for the sake of an absolute equality felt most intensely in a moment he refers to as the “discharge.” Akin to Lacan’s notion of “enjoyment” (“jouissance,” the only substance known to psychoanalysis), the discharge provides a material ground for the party. The party is a body that can carry the egalitarian discharge after the crowds disperse, channeling its divisive promise of justice into organized political struggle.

Crowds

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