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# Crowds and Party
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Le Bon does not view crowds as a mass of bodies in the street. “Crowd” involves a concentration and directionality that encompasses people in a specific place and that extends to a wide array of structured institutions (parliament and jury) and imaginary communities (race and nation). More than a set of social relations, “crowd” for Le Bon is a process (“like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies”) or force in which individuals get caught (“Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes”).61 Early twenty-first century commentators will describe the same phenomena with terms like “cascade effects,” “band-wagoning,” “confirmation bias,” and “bubbles.” Informed by nineteenth-century science, Le Bon affiliates crowd processes with hallucination, barbarism, and the direction of the spinal cord instead of the brain.62 He correlates the strength of these processes with the dangers of crowd power: the “last surviving sovereign force of modern times” and “the only force that nothing menaces.”63
Le Bon conceives the unconscious racially as a hereditary substratum of similarity upon which individual differences are built. The unconscious encompasses a wide array of instincts and passions, affections and aversions, passed down through the generations. Vastly more influential than the mind’s conscious life, the unconscious always threatens to subsume the individual’s independent intellectual aptitudes, themselves the fragile achievements of reason, education, and elite culture. In a crowd, common characteristics overpower the rare achievements of intelligence. Ordinary qualities triumph over distinction and specialization. As Le Bon puts it, these qualities “in crowds become common property.”64 No matter their differences in occupation, intelligence, character, or mode of life, individuals in a crowd possess a collective mind, what Le Bon attributes to the “psychological law of the mental unity of crowds.”65 I should add that anxiety about subjection to the crowd, or, differently put, the fragility of the individual as a form of subjectivity, comes to characterize over a century of inquiry into the crowd, from Durkheim, through Mill, through twentieth-century American sociology’s emphases on the mass and conformity.66
In Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, Freud treats the unconscious as a crowd in two senses. The first is an analytic or structural sense of the repressed product of history, whether of family or species, as it impresses itself within the individual. Freud commends Le Bon’s discussion of the unconscious because it resonates so well with his own (adding that “as a matter of fact none of the author’s statements bring forward anything new”).67 The second is a more analogical sense where the unconscious is described in terms of the affective dynamics of the crowd. The forces in the unconscious are like the directed intensities of crowd processes. Freud shifts back and forth between these two senses in his attempt to explain the nature of group ties and the emergence of individual from group psychology. These explanations never quite cohere.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen challenges the Freudian postulate of the unity of the subject of the unconscious, suggesting instead that it is multiple, unascribable, and unidentifiable.68 In a deconstructive reading of psychoanalysis’s binaries of subject and other, desire and object, Borch-Jacobsen draws from René Girard to treat desire as primarily mimetic, positing a “primordial tendency” to identification.69 The details of this discussion exceed my purposes here. What’s compelling, though, is Borch-Jacobsen’s attunement to the ineluctable problem of individuation in psychoanalysis, the problem of being apart when one is always a part. As parts, we remain inextricably interconnected: every attempt to be apart, to separate, involves connection at another point or on another plane.70 Following a nuanced treatment of Freud’s writing on narcissism as symptomatically deploying sexuality in the context of Freud’s own professional rivalries, Borch-Jacobsen turns to Group Psychology. He asks whether Group Psychology is premised on a possibility Freud can’t let himself think and that he has perpetually to displace, namely, that of “a mass-ego, a primordial crowd.”71
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There is much to admire in Borch-Jacobsen’s reading. I want to note where mine diverges from his. Rather than attending to the two different senses of the unconscious as a crowd in Freud, Borch-Jacobsen absorbs the dynamic in the structural. He treats the crowd unconscious (for Le Bon and Freud) as a womb, “a soft, malleable, plastic, infinitely receptive material without will or desire or any specific instinct of its own.”72 Crowd as “matrical mass” fits with Borch-Jacobsen’s emphasis on the imaginary. It also fits with his critique of Freud insofar as Freud attempts to enclose the crowd within the form of the individual. The problem, however, is that neither Le Bon nor Freud presents the crowd as infinitely receptive and incapable of desire. Le Bon notes that influencing the crowd takes skill; the crowd senses its own strength and is thus intolerant of contradiction in those who speak before it.73 Since neither truth nor argument make a difference to crowds (they are not infinitely receptive), Le Bon emphasizes affirmation, repetition, and contagion as more promising methods of influence. Likewise Freud says that the crowd “may desire things passionately” and that it can tolerate no delay “between its desire and the fulfillment of what it desires.”74 His primary argument is that crowds are tied together libidinally; they are products of desire. In short, the unconscious processes associated with the crowd are more subjectal than Borch-Jacobsen acknowledges. The collectivity desires and wills, destroys and creates. These attributes precede Freud’s attempts to contain them in the unconscious of an individual whose own becoming-subject is contingent upon this containment.
Dolar advances beyond Borch-Jacobsen when he suggests that the unconscious as Freud describes it in Group Psychology takes place between the individual and the collective, “in the very establishment of the ties between an individual (becoming a subject) and a group to which s/he would belong.”75 Dolar declines to read Freud in terms of a collective unconscious because that “would demand a defined collectivity, a community to which it would pertain, but no such pre-given community exists.” Because Le Bon’s crowds are heterogeneous as well as homogeneous, criminal as well as moral, forming a collective mind “doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics,” however, I see no reason to presume a “defined collectivity.”76 “Defined collectivity” implies a collectivity that is known and inscribed rather than crowd characteristics, dynamics, and attributes that are themselves definable. It suggests bounded groups rather than momentary collectivities formed through a concentration of forces the exciting causes of which can only be retroactively determined. In Group Psychology, the unconscious is nothing but collective, an insight Freud attempts repeatedly to repress by enclosing its processes in an individual form never adequate to its task. Psychoanalysis as a field is possible and can contribute to the debates in crowd theory because the dynamics it investigates are already collective even as they are enclosed in the generic form of the individual.
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“Aprovisional beingformed ofheterogeneous elements”
Freud quotes extensively from The Crowd. Two ideas significant for Le Bon’s crowd concept appear in the first passage Freud lifts: the crowd as a source of new feelings, thoughts, and ideas; and the crowd as the novel consistency of a provisional being. First, individuals in a group are
in the possession of a sort of collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual one of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.
Second, the psychological group is a
provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.77
Freud doesn’t question the emergence of previously inexistent ideas and feelings. Nor does he challenge the notion of a new, provisional being. He fully assumes the idea that in a group, individuals combine into a temporary unity, a collectivity that did not exist prior to this combining. Freud wants to know what unites people in a crowd, what the character of the ties that bind them together is.
Le Bon had not concerned himself with what unites people in a crowd because he begins from the fact of collectivity—the provisional being of the crowd—seeking to understand its effects. He thus tries to explain why actions and affects not previously possessed by individuals emerge in a crowd.78 Freud recounts Le Bon’s three explanations. The first is that a crowd feels itself to have enormous power. This feeling of invincibility makes a person less likely to hold himself in check which means that he yields to instincts he would otherwise restrain. Freud writes this off as unimportant: of course our deepest selves lack responsibility; the crowd enables the individual to “throw off repressions.”79 Le Bon is mistaken in taking the sentiment of invincible power as a cause for the appearance of something new—nothing new is appearing. Rather, the impulses repressed in the unconscious have simply become free to manifest themselves. As Freud notes, his disagreement with Le Bon here stems from their differing accounts of the unconscious. Le Bon’s “racial mind” lacks the dimension of the “unconscious repressed” conceptualized by psychoanalysis, so for him the crowd does give rise to something new, something that cannot be reduced to the substratum of hereditary influences. Freud’s objection thus treats the dynamic Le Bon describes as a structure, shifting between the two senses of “unconscious” such that behavior in a crowd manifests what is contained in the human mind.
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More interesting to Freud is the second explanation Le Bon provides for the change effected by crowds: contagion. Contagion is kin to hypnosis in that it induces people to act in unexpected ways. Freud quotes Le Bon: “In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.”80 The third is suggestion. Freud fills the next page with Le Bon’s description of the “magnetic influence given out by the group,” the vanishing of conscious personality and loss of will, “the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts.”81 Freud notes an asymmetry in Le Bon’s account. Contagion refers to members’ effects on each other. Suggestion, particularly when understood in terms of hypnosis, implies something else entirely, the operation of a hierarchical relation of influence. Who is the hypnotist? I should add here that even today nearly everyone who writes about crowds describes crowds in terms of contagion and suggestion. We see the language of contagion, for instance, in discussions of networked media as well as in depictions of the movements, protests, occupations, and riots erupting in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Momentarily setting aside the matter of the hypnotist (just as he did the question of group ties), Freud includes another long quote from Le Bon:
by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian, that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.82
Freud approves, commending not just Le Bon’s “identification of the group mind with the mind of primitive people” but also noting the convergence between crowd theory and psychoanalysis. What crowd theory has found in crowds, psychoanalysis has observed “in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics.”83 The processes that Le Bon describes as changing the man in the crowd are for Freud indications of the crowd already in the man. He then repeats multiple elements of LeBon’s description, saying that the group is changeable, irritable, impulsive, credulous, incapable of persevering, desirous, intolerant of delays in the satisfaction of its desire, open to influence and that it thinks in images. “It has a sense of omnipotence;” “no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt.”84 The group is inclined to extremes, lacks a critical faculty and respects force. It has a thirst for obedience: “It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters.”85 Groups demand illusions. Distinctions between truth and falsity matter little. Words function more magically than rationally. A group “knows neither doubt nor certainty,” a phenomenon of unconscious life that Freud reminds his readers he has already discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams.
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To reiterate, insofar as Le Bon conceives the crowd in terms of a dynamic wherein energies are concentrated in a single direction, he sees the force of crowds expressed in races, castes, classes, nations, juries, parties, and parliamentary assemblies. All these can override individual judgment and opinion, eliciting effects that exceed what an individual would rationally decide to do on his own. These are psychological crowds where “crowd” names the novel consistency temporarily formed from interlinked processes. The last third of The Crowd examines the particular characteristics that arise when different collectivities are “transformed into a crowd under the influences of the proper exciting causes.”86 Most commentators on Le Bon miss this transformative dimension of Le Bon’s crowd concept. They criticize him for blurring the boundaries of the crowd such that there is no difference between juries and mobs when they should commend him for drawing out the dynamics shaping collectivities. Freud doesn’t miss this point because he doesn’t share the sociologists’ concern with classifying groups. His interest is in establishing the reputation of psychoanalysis by demonstrating its explanatory power. For Freud, whether an individual is physically in a group—in the crowd or in an institution—is no different from whether the group manifests itself in the individual—as with the nation or race. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the individual in a crowd and subject to its emergent dynamics is just another instance of the individual as such, a fragile ego grappling with unevenly repressed desires and drives.
From Group Psychology to Individual Psychology … and Back
Although Freud praises the brilliance of Le Bon’s depiction of the group mind, he’s not satisfied with Le Bon’s discussion of what ties the group together. This is where Freud thinks that psychoanalysis can contribute to crowd psychology. It can explain the desires and instincts that underlie group cohesion instead of taking for granted the primacy of an instinct to sociality. The liability to affect and intellectual inhibition that alters the individual in a crowd, Freud argues, should not be attributed to number, to a quantity of people. Instead, it can be explained with basic psychoanalytic concepts. Moving from many to one, Freud’s explanation encloses the directed intensities of Le Bon’s crowd into an individual unconscious. Collective desire is reduced to an amplification of frustrated individual desire. Forces associated with the crowd become unconscious processes within an individual. Freud works to prevent these processes from rupturing the individual, but his efforts at containment never quite succeed, held in place, ultimately, through the reassertion of the “scientific myth” of the primal horde.
In his initial step toward enclosure, Freud criticizes the authorities on group psychology for appealing to “suggestion” in their attempts to understand crowd processes such as imitation and contagion, in other words, “influence without logical foundation.”87 Freud finds these accounts of suggestion circular: they rely on the idea that suggestibility is a fundamental mental fact (ein weiter nicht reduzierbares Urphänomen). As Borch-Jacobsen writes, “when Freud rises up against the tyranny of suggestion, he is of course militating in favor of the autonomy of the individual subject.”88 Already in his shift from the active process of “suggestion” (die Suggestion)
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to the more passive, receiving “suggestibility” (die Suggerierbarkeit), Freud takes a group process and makes it into an attribute of an individual.89
Looking “behind the shelter, the screen, of suggestion,” Freud finds love. Group ties are libidinal ties. The individual gives up his distinctiveness to the group because he wants to be in harmony with its members. Given the violent, disruptive, and volatile crowds Le Bon describes, this is a very strange move. Freud justifies it by faulting Le Bon for paying insufficient attention to the leader and by attending himself to groups that crowd theory typically ignores: the church and the army. This enables Freud to oedipalize the crowd, to enclose it into the oedipal relationships crucial to his theory of individual psychology. Church and army are each headed by a leader (Christ, commander) “who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love.” The illusion of equal love is absolutely essential, Freud tells us. Everything depends on it. Christ stands in relation to the individuals in the church as an elder brother or “father surrogate.” Because of the equality of members—each shares equally in Christ’s love— the church is like a family. Members call each other brother: “the tie which unites each individual to Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another.”90 The army is basically the same, with the fundamental difference being that this familial structure is repeated in a hierarchical fashion (sections, units, squadrons, etc.). What matters here to Freud is the double nature of the libidinal tie of the group: individual to leader, individual to individual. Group ties have to be libidinal if they are to be strong enough to limit the narcissism that Freud attributes to the individual.
Yet the forces Freud describes exceed the structure in which he wants to place them. He has been attempting to remedy the problem of the circularity of suggestion by appealing to libido. To cement his case, he considers the complicating example of panic (as discussed by another crowd theorist, William McDougall). On the one hand, panic “means the disintegration of the group.” On the other, it is an intensification of affect through contagion. This produces the paradox that what binds unbinds. Freud thinks that understanding group ties libidinally solves the problem insofar as panic is analogous to anxiety and is thus manifest because of an increase in danger or a cessation of emotional ties. Borch-Jacobsen points out the resulting contortions this results in for Freud:
the disappearance of the libidinal-political bond that ensured the cohesion of the group does not liberate narcissistic egos in a pure and simple unbonding. In a way, it liberates nothing at all, and especially not autonomous subjects (individuals), since panic consists precisely in an unmasterable overflowing of ego by way of (affects of) others; or, put somewhat differently, panic consists in a mimetic-contagious epidemic narcissism. The example of panic is thus not the counter-example of the group, and Freud’s argument can easily be turned around: by making panic the exemplary example of individual psychology, a paradoxical result is achieved—namely, that narcissism does away with itself in one of its most striking manifestations, since panic is tantamount to a gaping, more or less bewildered opening toward others.91
Another way to describe this same contortion is to note that it results from Freud’s structuring of process. Panic is an affective force, a flow that disrupts as it moves. It is not the counterexample to the group or crowd because it is itself unleashed as a dispersion of crowd intensity. The problem Freud encounters is the result of his attempt to enclose this intensity in the form of the individual. Freud focuses on the scattered elements rather than the common dynamic that scatters them.
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There are further challenges Freud encounters as he deploys psychoanalysis against crowd theory and explains group ties as a reinforcing combination of aim-inhibited object love and mutual identification. At key points he illustrates his argument by appealing to girls and women: the hysterical sympathetic identification of boarding school girls longing for secret love affairs and the “troop of women and girls” crowded around a singer or pianist with whom they are all in love. Le Bon’s fierce and powerful crowds ready “to pillage a palace, or to die in defense of a stronghold or a barricade” are diminished and truncated, enclosed in the bourgeois sites of boarding school and concert hall, the ferocity of collective power turned inward as identification through love for a shared object. Collective desire becomes nothing but common frustration.
Borch-Jacobsen explores Freud’s discussion of the imbrication of identification and object love, drawing out the strange loops in Freud’s efforts to shore up an individual ego the emergence of which perpetually eludes him. Freud presents a graphic representation of these loops at the close of chapter eight. I limit myself here to noting Freud’s acknowledgement that “We cannot for long enjoy the illusion that we have solved the riddle of the group with this formula.”92 He recognizes that his discussion of church and army unfairly emphasizes the leader and keeps “the other factor of mutual suggestion too much in the background.”93 And he wonders whether it would have been simpler, more modest, just to accept the idea of a herd instinct (he invokes Wilfred Trotter, Instincts ofthe Herd in War and Peace, 1916). But he concludes no. There’s no such thing as a primary herd instinct. What’s at work is the more complex structure he already outlined, the one where multiple individuals identify with one another in their love for the same object. The reason the herd instinct doesn’t explain groups is that it leaves no room for the leader, which Freud has already asserted to be crucial. The leader is necessary because he is that point in relation to which all the others are equal to one another. The members assert their equality to one another in light of the leader’s superiority to them all. Freud presents the demand for equality as a reaction-formation arising out of envy; if one can’t have the special relation to the leader, no other shall either. The equality of the crowd is thus a kind of negative solidarity of rivals. Freud substitutes for the herd instinct a horde. Man is a horde animal, “an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.”94
For Freud the primal horde is the originary form that the crowd revives. He notes that the dynamics associated with crowds—“the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of the affective side of the mind and of unconscious psychical life”—are contained in his idea of the primal horde.95 Freud thereby morphs crowd processes into a closed, mythic, ur-form of sociality. Group behavior corresponds to a regression to a primitive mental state.
According to Freud’s myth of the primal horde, because of the strong emotional ties connecting the group, “there was only a common will, there were no single ones.”96
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Freud thus posits that the oldest psychology is group psychology. Individual psychology comes out of it “by a gradual process which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete.”97 But he quickly corrects himself, making individual and group psychology co-primary. Why? Because of the leader, the free, strong, and willful father of the horde. This reintroduces the problem of individual psychology at another level: not just where this primal father comes from but how a member can become a leader. “There must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology”—which is precisely Freud’s own task in Group Psychology.98 But his answer is nearly nonsensical. It turns back in on itself by suggesting that the sons were initially individuals forced by the primal father’s sexual jealousy into group psychology, which would mean that individual psychology comes first. And, it posits a successor who will be allowed access to women, breaking his libidinal ties to the group. Succession is force in reverse, as if the sons in the horde retained their initial individual desires rather than merging them in group psychology. Freud uses the myth to hold in place and conceal the disruption of the individual form of psychic structure by crowd processes. The myth narrates the processes together in a story where division is forced no less than connection and where the affective dynamics that disrupt are the same as those that bind.
In a postscript to Group Psychology, as if compelled to make his myth itself more dynamic, Freud supplements his abbreviated discussion of the horde. He brings in the patricidal story from Totem and Taboo, which lets him add dissatisfaction, new developments, breakdown, and compensation to the myth. Freud does so in order to provide another origin for, a mythic myth of, the emergence of the individual from the group.
In the elaborated myth, the first to break free of the group is the poet. The poet disguises the truth of the slaying of the father, putting a hero in the place of the crowd (present in fairy tales as the small animals and insects who help the hero accomplish his tasks). By creating the hero myth, the poet gives the group an idealized individual with whom each can identify. Each can imagine himself as the hero, acting alone and abolishing the one who oppresses them all. The poet, an imaginary figure of imagining, writes the individual into being, much as Freud himself does when he asserts the primacy of the father of the horde.
The figures of leader and poet take the place of the crowd, becoming themselves models of subjectivity in its individuated form. As I mentioned, Freud finds Le Bon’s discussion of the leader insufficient. In The Crowd, Le Bon doesn’t talk about leaders until midway through the text. When he does, he treats the leader as the nucleus of will around which a crowd forms, what we could also express in Lacanese as an objectcause of crowd desire. The crowd doesn’t desire the leader; the leader incites and directs the desire of the crowd. The leader is an instigator, an agitator whose intensity inspires the crowd and concentrates its attention. And even as Le Bon allows for the rare, great leaders of history, those whose will is so powerful and enduring that “nothing resists it; neither nature, gods nor man,” he focuses primarily on the fact that the leader begins as one of the led and that he is led himself, hypnotized by the idea as Robespierre was by Rousseau.99 The idea possesses the leader such that nothing else exists for him, which explains why leaders of the crowd “are recruited from the ranks of the morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.” For Le Bon, the leader concentrates and transmits an idea, turning it into a cause of action. Indeed, he considers the possibility that mass periodicals may even be replacing the leader in that they, too, can simplify, consolidate, and transmit ideas.
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Rather than conceiving the leader as hypnotized, Freud treats the leader as hypnotist: “the hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him.”100 He argues further that the very uncanniness of hypnosis suggests something familiar but repressed, whether that of the child’s relation to his parents or of the primal horde to the primal father. Freud thereby transfers a certain passivity in Le Bon’s leader—fascination with the idea—to the crowd. The leader becomes active in their place. As primal father, the leader acquires a freedom, independence, and intellectual capacity altogether missing in Le Bon even as he bears traces of the excesses of the crowd in his own furious enjoyment. Freud emphasizes that the father of the horde needs no reinforcement from others. Le Bon makes the leader himself a follower, a conduit for the natural instincts of a crowd no longer obedient to governmental authority.
Just as Freud transposes the activity of the crowd onto the leader, so too does he transfer the crowd’s creativity to the poet. Early in Group Psychology he acknowledges the genius of groups “as is shown above all by language itself, as well as by folk-song, folklore and the like.”101 Le Bon had credited crowds with the creation of language. By the end of Group Psychology, creativity is the province of the individual, the singular poet who invents the heroic myth of the slaying of the father.
Freud presents psychoanalysis as capable of explaining aspects of behavior in groups central to crowd theory. Where crowd theorists see numbers, contagion, and suggestion as innovating, as producing actions that are unexpected and uncontrollable, Freud finds the explicable patterns of individual psychology: nothing new here, except Freud’s own findings. The collective subjectivity of Le Bon’s powerful, sovereign, often criminal and sometimes heroic crowd is incorporated in an individual figured as leader or poet, and the individual form becomes itself the site of struggling desires, drives, ideals, and anxieties, organic processes localized at best in a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements. So rather than explaining the crowd, Freud encloses it, fragilely and awkwardly. Where there were many, there appears one. Psychoanalysis’s attempt to account for collective desire condenses and displaces it into the individual form. Perhaps surprisingly, we learn more about collective subjectivity from the notorious Le Bon than we do from Freud.
Conclusion
If the subject is interpellated as an individual, the strengths of many become the imaginary attributes of one. The individual appears as the locus of a capacity for innovation and interruption that is only ever an effect of collectivities. If bourgeois ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, as we learn from Althusser, these conditions will be represented repeatedly as individual matters of individual preference and choice, belief, and circumstance. The contradictions constitutive of capitalist relations will exist side by side, appearing as so many dreams or neuroses. Collectivity, in turn, will be figured derivatively, in the shadow of the individual such that the subjectivity it evinces fails to appear as an effect of a subject. Rather than as the dynamic force of the crowd, desire appears as personal longing. Rather than an inescapable circuit of activity, drive appears as addiction. While the subject of psychoanalysis is not the reasonable, self-aware subject of liberalism, when the unconscious is rendered as that of an individual, psychoanalysis is drafted into its service as covert support for an individuated subjectivity conceived in terms of a rational and knowable will. Recognizing the collective as a subject becomes all the more challenging because the terms of what counts as the act of a subject are truncated and distorted. Rather than heterogeneous, conflictual, temporary, unbounded, and in need of support from objects and figures that exceed it, the subject as individual is impossibly, fantastically independent and enduring. The crowd becomes unconscious again in the continued operation of enclosure effected by the individual form.
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Althusser asks why the relation given to individuals of their collective material life is an imaginary relation. My answer is that it is imaginary because it is given to them as individuals. Althusser, though, tries a different explanation, one that emphasizes practices of belief—kneeling, praying, shaking hands. He wants to get at the material dimension of ideology in practices, but he misses the ways these practices are collective, generic. In themselves, they are not individuating but rather the practices of a body of believers, a collectivity. Deploying Freud as backup, Althusser nevertheless asserts that individuals are always-already subjects, particularly to the extent that they are born into a family, a place: “it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.”102 His assertion points not to the inevitability of subjection but to the specificity of interpellation as an individual in the bourgeois family. In this regard, Althusser intermixes generic and naming practices, failing to distinguish between those that involve groups and those that single out an individual by name.
Le Bon is an odious reactionary. The Crowd sounds the alarm, alerting elites to the threat of mass power and giving the rest of us a window into the will formed, expressed, and unleashed as that of a collective subject. Collectivity brings with it a sense of invincibility, an immense courage and capacity to put self-interest aside. It is accompanied by an unshakeable equality, a demand for justice that Freud acknowledges even as he derives it from an original envy. The “exciting causes” of the crowd’s directed intensity are unpredictable and temporary, which adds to the anxiety of elites endeavoring to hold onto the privilege they associate with their individuality before they are themselves swept up, compelled into thoughts and actions they abhor. Destructive, creative, unpredictable, temporary, and intense: the crowd expresses the paradoxical power of the people as subject.
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