--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Crowds and Party" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781781686942" library_document_id: "e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc" source_sha256: "f534ec563af19563b91637b0ce1509fb0241786bf679761d0d53b587a58d09de" pdf_physical_page_count: 183 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 40 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc?start=40&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=40&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=30&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=50&limit=10" --- # Crowds and Party > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=40 | PRINTED_PAGE=41 Turkle’s interviewees describe themselves in ways that rub up against Turkle’s own concerns with separation and individuation. For example, a nurse, tired after eight hours at work and a second shift at home, says that she logs onto Facebook and feels less alone. A college junior explains, “I feel that I am part of a larger thing, the Net, the Web. The world. It becomes a thing to me, a thing I am part of. And the people, too. I stop seeing them as individuals, really. They are part of this larger thing.”50 The student’s words here resonate with a line from Félix Guattari: “The collective engagement is at once the subject, the object and the expression. No longer is the individual always the reference point for the dominant significations.”51 The college junior feels himself and others to be part of a larger collectivity such that viewing himself and others as separate, as individuals, makes no sense; it loses the connection that arises through their mutual engagement. For Turkle, though, connectivity is so pathological that she depicts it biochemically, as an addiction. Her argument relies on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “flow.” Most references to flow are positive, descriptions of a desirable experience of focus, involvement, and immersion. Turkle’s, however, is critical: “In the flow state, you are able to act without self-consciousness” (as I describe below and explore in greater detail in the next chapter, this absence of self-consciousness is an attribute crowd theorists associate with being in a group, mass, or crowd). For Turkle, acting without self-consciousness is a problem because “you can have it when texting or e-mailing or during an evening on Facebook” (again, the use of the second person pronoun points to Turkle’s attempt to implicate us in practices that are threatening and must be combatted).52 Melding game and life, that is, actual games like World of Warcraft, with email and Facebook, Turkle explains, “When online life becomes your game, there are new complications. If lonely, you can find continual connection. But this may leave you more isolated, without real people around you. So you may return to the Internet for another hit of what feels like connection.”53 She uses neurochemistry to justify the language of addiction: Our neurochemical response to every ping and ring tone seems to be the one elicited by the “seeking” drive, a deep motivation of the human psyche. Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an e-mail, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself. We learn to require it, even when it depletes us.54 Turkle’s pathologizing treatment of connectivity blurs interaction with machines— phones, computers—with interactions with people. Our brains react to sounds by releasing—injecting—dopamine. But rather than this reaction being a valuable reinforcement of our connections with others, it is a dangerous stimulant that we crave. Would happy neurochemical responses to seeing people face-to-face be similarly suspect? Is the thrill of contact with others at a party, in a rally, at a concert, or in a crowd also at risk of becoming a craving insofar as such intense and demanding contact might also deplete us? 41 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=41 | PRINTED_PAGE=42 If we do not give normative priority to the individual as the proper or exclusive form of subjectivity, we can read the evidence Turkle offers differently. We can read it as an indication that a political form of separation and enclosure is changing, mutating, becoming something else. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri follow Gilles Deleuze in describing this change as the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control. They point out how disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce individuated subjects.55 By the end of the twentieth century, disciplining and mediating institutions—the nuclear family, the school, the union, and the church—were in crisis (Lasch’s cultural narcissism is one diagnosis of this crisis). The spaces, logics, practices, and norms previously coalescing into social and economic institutions broke down and apart. In some instances, the release of an institutional logic from its spatial constraints gave it all the more force; in other instances, the opposite occurred. Thus, Hardt and Negri argue that pervasive institutional dissolution has been accompanied by an “indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities produced.”56 Hardt and Negri conclude that the bourgeois individual—the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, the liberal subject willing to vote in public and then return home to his private domesticity—can no longer serve as a presupposition of theory or action. They suggest that in its place, we find fluid, hybrid, and mobile subjectivities who are undisciplined, who have not internalized specific norms and constraints, and who can now only be controlled. Hardt and Negri are right to point to the changes in the settings that produced the bourgeois individual. Yet they underplay the emergent ferocity of commanded individuality. Their fluid, hybrid, and mobile subjectivities appear as loci of freedom, as if their singularity were a natural property rather than itself enjoined, inscribed, and technologically generated in the service of capitalism. As the decline of discipline weakened individuating structures, new technologically mediated techniques of individuation took their place. An easy example (one prominent in Turkle’s discussion) is the adoption of mobile phones as personal communication devices for kids. Enabling parents to keep track from a distance, phones fill in for the direct supervision and contact that has diminished in the wake of increasing work demands on parents, particularly mothers. Additional such techniques and technologies of individuation include competition in intensified labor markets as they induce a marketing relation to oneself; targeted advertisements that urge consumers to differentiate and specify themselves; locative technologies associated with mobile phones and GPS; cookies and other data-gathering techniques associated with transactions on the internet; political injunctions to personal participation; and, in the US, a rights-based political culture focused on personal identity, harm, and exclusion as opposed to common, collective, and systemic injustice—within this culture, systemic problems such as exploitation in the workplace and amplified personal indebtedness are treated as the effects of individual choices, preferences, and luck. The fluidity that Hardt and Negri observe, then, is accompanied by the technologies and practices of commanded individuality. The result is that the expectation of unique individuality exerts demands that are as constant and unyielding as they are impossible to meet. 42 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=42 | PRINTED_PAGE=43 That the young people Turkle interviews express anxieties associated with autonomy and connection is not surprising. They are enjoined to individuality, told each individual is selfsame, self-creating, self-responsible: one is born alone and one dies alone; you can rely on no one but yourself. Yet the technologies that further individuation— smartphone, tablet, laptop—and the platforms that encourage it—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr—provide at the same time an escape from and alternative to individuation: connection to others, collectivity. Crowds As I explore more thoroughly in subsequent chapters, Elias Canetti’s weird yet compelling anthropology of crowds (Adorno described it as a scandal) addresses an anxiety different from the one that concerns Turkle.57 He considers not the fear of being alone but the fear of being touched: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.”58 The one place where man is free of this fear is in a crowd. “The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body,” Canetti writes, “a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him.”59 Turkle thinks that people’s aversion to talking on the phone (as opposed to texting) and conversing face-to-face reflects their need for filters, for ways to handle sensory and information overload. They reflect, she suggests, not only a longing for solitude but also the way that in a stimulation and simulation culture we have become cyborgs.60 Canetti suggests an alternative interpretation: we may be coming to prefer the crowd, the presence of many that opens us to collectivity and relieves us of anxiety. One-on-one conversations may feel too constraining insofar as they enclose us back in an individual form. Rather than part of a group, of many, we are just ourselves. If this is plausible, then we have an alternative way to think about preoccupations with numbers of friends, followers, blog hits, shares, and retweets. They do not indicate personal achievement or popularity. They mark our absorption in the crowd, how densely we are enmeshed in it. So, to be clear, we can think of these counts in the individualist terms given us by capital. We can also recognize them as something else, as markers of belonging to something larger than oneself. In this latter sense, they reassure us that we are not unique but common. For Canetti, the relief we feel in a crowd is paradoxical. It arises from a fear of others, a feeling that others are threatening, which “reverses into its opposite” in the crowd.61 In a discussion with Adorno, he explains that he believes that people like to become a crowd because of “the relief they feel at the reversal of the feeling of being touched.”62 From this vantage point, the craving for dopamine Turkle describes seems more like the relief we may feel when we shake off the fears associated with individuation—isolation, exposure, vulnerability. 43 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=43 | PRINTED_PAGE=44 One might object that Canetti’s crowd is physical and the networked crowd is virtual. This objection is compelling—part of the power of the occupations of Tahrir Square, Syntagma Square, and the Occupy movement’s multiple parks and sites came from the force of bodies out of doors in collectivities authorized by neither capital nor the state. But the objection implies a distinction between the physical and the virtual that crowd theory consistently destabilizes. Most crowd theorists attend to physical and virtual crowds. They draw out “crowd” as a verb, as dynamics, and as affects that traverse and constitute collectivity. Canetti himself describes invisible crowds of the dead and spermatozoa. As I detail in the next chapter, Gustave Le Bon’s influential (albeit notoriously reactionary) work on crowds treats the crowd primarily as a psychological concept. Le Bon goes so far as to claim enigmatically that “crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.”63 Furthermore, technologies of presencing have developed so as to make our mediated interactions feel all the more present and intense. We are interacting with others, not just screens. When we register trending hashtags and multishared stories, we experience the force of many. In social media, the many flow across our screens, waves of images and expressions of feeling with effects that accumulate, resonate, and consolidate into patterns irreducible to any particular position or utterance. Canetti notes “how gladly one falls prey to the crowd.”64 The crowd, virtual and physical, moves and intoxicates. Canetti writes, “you were lost, you forgot yourself, you felt tremendously remote and yet fulfilled; whatever you felt, you didn’t feel it for yourself; it was the most selfless thing you knew; and since selfishness was shown, talked, and threatened on all sides, you needed this experience of thunderous unselfishness like the blast of the trumpet at the Last Judgment.”65 The experience of flow that overwhelms the conscious experience of self that Turkle finds so threatening, then, might also be understood as a breaking out of the illusion that the individual is and can be a subject of action (rather than a form of enclosure and containment) and a giving-over to a crowd. We’ve Got to Be We The crumbling of capitalist realism—the shaking off of Margaret Thatcher’s destructive mantra that “there is no alternative” to unfettered capitalist competition—has led to mainstream acknowledgement that capitalism is a system that takes from the many and gives to the few.66 Today no one denies the fact that some always lose in the capitalist economy. The system produces losers—the unemployed, the homeless, the indebted, the conned, the wiped out, the abandoned, the sacrificed. It runs on debt, foreclosure, expropriation, eviction, dispossession, destruction—these are just other words for privatization. But then what? Ever since the Left started looking at itself and the world in terms of individual specificity and the efficiency of markets, it has seemed easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine an organized Left. 44 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=44 | PRINTED_PAGE=45 Characterized by a perspective foreshadowed by Marxism Today’s debate over the new times, a left realism has congealed around a set of loosely held suspicions. This left realism may not be endorsed in its entirety by any particular political or theoretical tendency. No one that I know of has published an explicitly developed left realist position. Yet the fragmenting of left politics into an ever-expanding array of populist, liberal, progressive, trans, pluralist, green, multiculturalist, anti-racist, radical democratic, feminist, identitarian, anarchist, queer, autonomist, horizontalist, antiimperialist, insurrectionist, libertarian, socialist, and communist persuasions is symptomatic of such a realism, the premises of which manifest as suspicions time and again—in arguments among activists and academics, retorts at meetings, and rejoinders in social media. These premises are that collectivity is undesirable and that collectivity is impossible. Collectivity is undesirable because it is suspected of excluding possibilities, effacing difference, and enforcing discipline.67 “What do you mean ‘we’?” is one slogan of this suspicion, typically lobbed into contexts and discussions deemed insufficiently attentive to the specificities of each person’s experience. “Diversity of tactics” sometimes comes up as another such slogan, particularly when invoked to secure space for small-group confrontations with the police at the expense of broader political coordination. Some find collectivity to be undesirable because of its opposition to individual responsibility and freedom. Rejecting the communisms of Badiou as well as Hardt and Negri, Vanessa Lemm warns, “In both these trends, the process of subjectivation tends to dissolve the individual into a ‘multitude’ or a ‘cause’ that is supra-individual and that, far from assuming responsibility for one’s freedom, demands that one surrender it.”68 Lemm offers a Nietzschean “counterforce to the radical egalitarianism” of the communists, emphasizing how Nietzsche’s “aristocratic conception of culture” relies on “cultivating the responsibility of singular individuals.” Others position collectivity as undesirable by insinuating that collectivity has to be imposed; any collective employs a state logic. Banu Bargu’s bold deployment of Max Stirner’s egoist view of liberation as an individual project of self-valorization best exemplifies this view: to realize their own uniqueness and potential, egoists “should direct their efforts not only against the state, but against any collectivity and collective project.”69 In the place of an undesirable collectivity, left realism offers up diversity, plurality, and multiplicity. To this end, Eugene W. Holland wants to create a “multiplicity of multiplicities.”70 Jimmy Casas Klausen and James Martel likewise encourage expressions of human diversity and view thriving political and economic associations as those that are adaptable, contingent, and multiple.71 And Andrew Koch claims that anarchism is the “only justifiable political stance” because of its defense of the infinite pluralism of individuated meaning.72 Such views proceed as if such multiplicity were primarily ontological, rather than also stimulated by capitalism for its benefit and preservation.73 They also underplay state interest in plurality, particularly the fragmentations that hinder collective opposition and the individuations that facilitate 45 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=45 | PRINTED_PAGE=46 targeting, isolation, and control. Left realism’s second premise is that collectivity is impossible. We are so different, so singularized in our experiences and ambitions, so invested in the primacy of one set of tactics over another that we can’t cohere in common struggle. At best we can find momentary affinities and provisional coalitions. Politics should thus involve cultivating our own unique point of view—or the point of view of our sect, tribe, or locale—rather than trying to organize these views into something like a strategy. Left realism implies that coming together itself should be exposed as a fantasy covering over a hidden Hobbesian impulse to transcendence, a myth some use to manipulate others into fighting for their interests. A further variation on the premise of impossibility is that fundamental changes in the world economy preclude collectivity.74 Rather than concentrating workers in centralized locations, contemporary capitalism disperses them across the globe. It relies on long supply chains and global capital, using complexity to dissolve sites of accountability.75 Workers in ever more sectors of the capitalist economy are thus isolated, immiserated, and politically disorganized. To be sure, immiseration and political disorganization also characterize the early decades of revolutionary socialism. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Rosa Luxemburg all emphasize how competition means that workers tend to remain isolated, lack solidarity, and take a long time to unite. This is why unions and parties have to be created and why creating them is a struggle. Left realism’s one-sided emphasis on the objective dimension of our present capitalist setting fails to acknowledge the subjective dimension of perspective, organization, and will: our perspective is part of the setting it sees. This subjective dimension has always been crucial to the Marxist tradition. The communist response to isolation is not to let the reality that produces individualism determine our political horizon. Instead, it is to build solidarity. The assumptions that collectivity is both undesirable and impossible derive from an even more insidious assumption of left realism: that politics involves the individual. Manuel Castells, for example, treats as a key cultural transformation “the emergence of a new set of values defined as individuation and autonomy, rising from the social movements of the 1970s, and permeating throughout society in the following decades with increasing intensity.”76 Exactly how politics involves the individual varies—no one speaksfor me but me; the personal is political; ifI can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. But the premise remains the same: a left politics has to encourage and express the multiplicity of individual projects. Individuals have to choose and decide—even as the left fails to provide something anyone could actually choose. Leaders, vanguards, and parties are modes of politics for a time not our own, we are told. They are remnants of a political-economic assemblage that has already crumbled.77 Left realism feels realistic to some because it resonates with the prevailing ethos of late neoliberalism that tells us to do it ourselves, stay local and small, and trust no one because they will only betray us. It affirms capitalism’s insistence on immediacy and flexibility and the state’s replacement of long-term planning and social services by crisis management and triage. Left realism is good on spontaneous outrage. But it fails to organize itself in a way that can do something with this outrage. Disorganized, it remains unable to use crises to build and take power much less construct more equitable and less crisis-prone social and economic arrangements. 46 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=46 | PRINTED_PAGE=47 The realism in which the Left has been immersed in the neoliberal decades has meant that even when we are fully conscious of the deep inequity of the system in which we find ourselves, we confirm and conform to the dominant ideology: turn inward, enclave, emphasize the singular and momentary. Sometimes we don’t feel like we can do anything about it (maybe we have too much work to do already). Or we find ourselves participating in individuated, localized, or communicatively mediated activities without momentum, duration, or a capacity for political memory. Or we presume that we have to focus on ourselves, start with ourselves and thereby redirect political struggle back into ourselves. In a brutal, competitive, and atomized society, psychic well-being is so difficult that success on this front can feel like a significant accomplishment. Trying to do it themselves, people are immiserated and proletarianized and confront this immiseration and proletarianization alone. This chapter has sought to dismantle the assumption of the political primacy of the individual that binds left politics to the dominant capitalist imaginary and that prevents us from seeing the concentration of politics onto the individual as symptomatic of left defeat. Rather than a locus for creativity, difference, agency, and responsibility, the individual is the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities. Commanded individuality obscures individual incapacity even as it amplifies the contradictions barely congealed in the individual form. At the same time, these commands and incapacities attest to another force, the power of collectivity that manifests in crowds. 1 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, New York: The New Press, 2010, 72. Throughout this chapter, I blur together individualism, individuality, and individuation, treating them as component aspects of capitalist society’s requirement for and production of individuals. 2 Product release: “Dr Pepper Celebrates Its Legacy Of Originality With The Launch Of The New ‘Always One Of A Kind’ Advertising Campaign,” news.drpeppersnapplegroup.com, January 9, 2012. 3 Jay Moye, “Summer of Sharing: ‘Share a Coke’ Campaign Rolls Out in the U.S.,” coca-colacompany.com, June 10, 2014. 4 Jerrold Seigel provides a comprehensive history of the individual in his The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. See also Jeremy Gilbert’s critical overview of competitive individualism, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, London: Pluto Press, 2014, esp. 30–42. Although the individualism of the US American present tends to be projected into the past as if it had always accompanied US capitalism, in the decades following the Civil War, US industrialists pushed for monopoly capitalism. In the words of John D. Rockefeller, “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return,” in Rob Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., New York: Vintage, 2007, 148. Thanks to Corey Robin for drawing this to my attention. 5 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton, 1979, xvi. 47 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=47 | PRINTED_PAGE=48 19 Ibid., 84. 20 Ibid., 98. 21 Ibid., 9. 30 Ibid., 15. 31 Ibid., 18. 34 Idid., 17. 36 Ibid., 21. 48 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=48 | PRINTED_PAGE=49 49 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=49 | PRINTED_PAGE=50 Enclosing the Subject “Subject” is a concept that continues to trouble political theory. Does “subject” direct us toward initiative and autonomy or subjugation and constraint? Efforts to decenter the subject—whether targeting Cartesianism, Hegelianism, Marxism, or humanism— grapple with the challenge of accounting for order and initiative, submission and resistance, freedom and determination. Theorists and activities inspired by other traditions get roped into these debates when they construe politics in terms of the thoughts, actions, or feelings of individuals. Not only is agency privileged over structure but the presumption that agents are individuals formats the alternative of autonomy or subjugation as an opposition between individual and collective. Collectivity comes to be associated with constraint, with preventing rather than enabling creativity and initiative. Liberal political theorists explicitly construe political agency as an individual capacity. Others take the individuality of the subject of politics for granted. I argue that the problem of the subject is a problem of this persistent individual form, a form that encloses collective political subjectivity into the singular figure of the individual. The first part of the chapter sets up the idea of enclosure via an inversion of Louis Althusser’s famous claim that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.1 The point of this inversion is less to critique Althusser than it is to provide a heuristic that can loosen the hold of the individual form on conceptions of political subjectivity. I demonstrate this point by putting the inverted formula, “the subject is interpellated as an individual,” in conversation with work in post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory. The second part of the chapter tracks the enclosing of the subject in the individual form as it appears in the encounter between psychoanalysis and crowd theory, more specifically, in Sigmund Freud’s appropriation of the notorious Gustave Le Bon. Continuing the argument from chapter one, my goal is to break free from the individualizing assumptions that hinder understanding the political subject as a collective subject. The individual form encloses collective bodies, ideas, affects, and sensations into a singular, bounded body. The link between individuality and political subjectivity, however, is neither necessary nor natural. It is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge in bourgeois modernity. Just as the commodity is a form for value, so is the individual a form for subjectivity. It is a form that impedes collective political subjectivity by separating it into and containing it within individuated bodies and psyches. C. B. MacPherson’s presentation of seventeenth-century liberalism is one of the clearest expositions of this vision of the individual. MacPherson argues that at the heart of liberal theory is a “possessive individual” conceived as “the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”2 He uses Thomas Hobbes and John Locke as his examples. In MacPherson’s reading, for Hobbes and Locke the essence of being human is “freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.”3 They understand the individual neither primarily as a part or member, nor as fundamentally and irrevocably dependent on relations with others, human and nonhuman. Rather, the individual is in essence one who owns himself and his capacities. 2 50 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=50&limit=10)