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# Crowds and Party
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A crowd provides an opportunity for the emergence of a political subject. It doesn’t determine this emergence. It can’t control the politics to which it gives rise. But this politics can itself proceed with more or less fidelity to the crowd event, attempting to carry on and out its equality or trying to repress, deny, and dissipate it.14 The crowd’s chaotic moment is indeterminate, but to fetishize this indeterminacy dematerializes the crowd, extracting the affective intensities rupturing a given setting from the rupture itself, as if a crowd event were nothing more than semantic confusion. The cacophony of impressions and transports of the unknown among the unknown releases a sense of the many channeled in the everyday along set paths, igniting possibilities that will appear in retrospect to have been there all along. The political challenge is maintaining fidelity to this sense of the many—the crowd discharge—without fetishizing the cacophonous rupture. The party is a form for meeting this challenge, maintaining fidelity even as its position is itself an effect of the crowd. In Marxist theory, treatments of the Paris Commune—a key touchstone for grappling with the political form of rule by the working people—illustrate this point.
The Paris Commune
A feature of every discussion of the Paris Commune is the crowd, the people, the working class, the shocking presence of those who have been excluded from politics now in its place and the confounding of politics that results. In the Commune event, crowd and Commune overlap in an expression of the desire of the people. Interpretations of the Commune read this desire, making claims about who the people are and what it is that they want.
It’s not quite right to say that what the people wanted was the Commune: prior to March 18, 1871 clubs and associations throughout Paris had repeatedly called for elections to a new Commune. People had rioted. But the protests and dissent hadn’t yet broken the connection with the National Government. That doesn’t happen until the National Government attempts to disarm the Paris National Guard and the crowd emerges to stop it. In the wake of this rupture, advocates for a new municipal government, a Commune, present the Commune as answer and object, answer to the question of the political form for Paris (and perhaps all of France) and object of the desire of the people. The desiring people are an effect of the positing of the object of their desire. They don’t precede it. What precedes it is the crowd.
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An eyewitness describes the crowd on March 18 as it defended the cannons from the troops sent in to take them:
The women and children were swarming up the hill-side in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the action of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.15
The collective people manifest as a force of nature. Like the sea, they engulf all that’s around them in waves.
Canetti describes the sea as a crowd symbol. He writes:
The dense coherence of the waves is something which men in a crowd know well. It entails a yielding to others as though they were oneself, as though there were no strict division between oneself and them. There is no escape from this compliance and thus the consequent impetus and feeling of strength is something engendered by all the units together.16
The impetus and feeling of strength, the will, arises out of the collective. Attempting to reduce it to the thoughts or decisions of individuals is as senseless as treating the sea in terms of aggregated drops of water. The press of bodies forward and back supersedes individual thought and decision. Sounds, smells, and combined reaction reinforce the sense of a new powerful collective.
The National Army yields to the crowd. The troops are absorbed in it, becoming non-troops as they shed the distinctions of place and rank: they fraternize and intermingle.17 The crowd offers wine and meat rolls, which are eagerly accepted by men who’d had no breakfast and had been standing in the cold for hours.18 The Times of London reported:
There was something intensely exciting in the scene. The uncertainty for a moment whether the men were meeting as friends or enemies, the wild enthusiasm of the shouts of fraternization, the waving of the upturned muskets, the bold reckless women laughing and exciting the men against their officers, all combined to produce a sensation of perplexity not unmingled with alarm at the strange and unexpected turn things were taking. 19
As the crowd increases and engulfs the troops, it intensifies. Through the addition of more, through the abolition of its outside, the crowd becomes stronger, more confident. When the general, Lecomte, arrives, he orders his troops to fire on the crowd. The troops refuse. He orders twice more. “Then the troops turned up the butts of their rifles, and amid the wild joy of relief, handed over them to the crowd in exchange for a mug of wine, a kind word, a fraternal embrace. ‘Long live the Republic!’ they shouted; and the crowd replied, ‘Long live the Line!’”20 The eyewitness account I mention above similarly evokes the egalitarian power of the crowd as it concludes: “The General gave in. He realized the full meaning of the situation. His faith in military power, his contempt for the people, his hopes and ambitious dreams, all had vanished in the face of stark reality: he had been taken prisoner.”21
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After March 18, there would be argument over who the Commune is—a workingclass government?—and what it wants, but no one will dispute the fact that the situation had turned on the actuality of an insistence and a desire. The crowd forces an opening, an interruption that changes the political setting. It ruptures suppositions of order, inciting thereby attempts to expand, enclose, and target the unleashed intensities in one direction rather than another.
That the March 18 crowd event was followed by the Commune does not mean that the crowd creates the Commune or that the Commune expresses the constituent power of the people. The Commune form precedes the crowd event. It was an already existent political possibility, attempted yet thwarted in revolts in October and January. Throughout the fall and winter of 1870–71, militants organized as vigilance committees in the districts of Paris debated proposals and planned demonstrations. Yet when in their attempts to establish the Commune they pushed for revolt, the people weren’t with them. In the elections following the October 31 march on the Hotel de Ville, over 322,000 Parisians voted in support of the National Government. 54,000 voted against.22 In January, only a few hundred people responded to the “red poster” calling for insurrection that was distributed by the delegation of the Twenty Districts, which “saw itself as the Commune to be constituted.”23 Later that month, even as thousands were dying from the Prussian siege, only a few insurgents showed up for a new insurrection planned for January 22. The insurrection was brutally suppressed, and the National Government cracked down on clubs, public meetings, and newspapers. The national elections held in February, however, made it clear that while the majority of the French countryside supported monarchy, the cities favored a republic. Resulting anxiety over the restoration of a monarchy, the convening of the National Assembly in Bordeaux, the Assembly’s failure to pay the National Guard in Paris, and the exodus of the bourgeoisie, not to mention the ongoing destitution of the people because of the siege, produced conditions more auspicious for an uprising. The previous efforts on behalf of the Commune establish in advance the idea of what an uprising would produce even as they can’t themselves produce it. Commune could name a division, “the direct antithesis to the empire,” in Marx’s words.24 Yet until the crowd creates the opening for it, it was just this “vague aspiration” denoting a fundamental opposition. As antithesis and aspiration, the Commune form precedes its arrival.
The struggle for the Commune is also a struggle over its meaning. It has been offered as a figure for republicanism, patriotic nationalism, federalism, centralism, communism, socialism, anarchism, even secessionism. Marx views the multiplicity of its interpretations, “and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor,” as indicative of the thorough expansiveness of the Commune form.25 This same excess can also be read as a lack, as the gap of the political. For example, although Charles Beslay’s opening speech depicts the Commune as a municipal government concentrating on local matters, its decrees quickly encompassed national affairs. As Prosper Olivier Lissagaray observes in his definitive account, it was “Commune in the morning, Constituent Assembly in the evening.”26 Contention over the political form of the Commune is inseparable from, indicative of, the Commune event.27 Multiplicity isn’t attributable to institutional innovations specific to the Commune. It’s an index of political division and the struggle over the Commune name: would the Commune be animated by fidelity to the crowd discharge or would another politics appropriate crowd energy in a direction antithetical to equality and collectivity?
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Consider reception of the Commune in the United States. Rather than animated by fidelity to the egalitarian crowd event, it was configured through the politics of Reconstruction.28 Political commitments antithetical to equality and collectivity attempted to appropriate the energy of the Parisian crowd. Some in the US North saw Paris as wrongfully seceding from France, just as the Southern states wrongly left the Union. Commune and Confederacy both rejected legitimate centralized government. Others in the North, increasingly mistrustful of popular sovereignty, used the Commune as an emblem of the failure of Reconstruction. An editor of The Nation railed against the “Socialism in South Carolina” that came from “allowing incompetent black men to govern and vote.”29 As he saw it, neither Paris nor the South had the political capacity to govern itself. Some Southerners embraced the parallel between Paris and the Confederacy, particularly the revolt against a repressive governmental authority. Weirdly, in 1880 a former vice president of the Confederacy identified himself as a communist—Alexander Stephens, who became a member of Congress after the war. For Stephens, to be a communist means to favor home rule, the sovereignty of the local government.30 He explicitly rejects the abolition of private property, capturing communist desire in a racist ressentiment that substitutes for and attempts to displace class struggle. In any case, the point is clear: contra Marx, the multiplicity of Commune interpretations has nothing to do with the expansiveness of the commune form. Rather, this multiplicity points to the struggle over the name incited by the rupture of the crowd event.
Marx suggests that the Paris Commune provides a glimpse of a solution to the problem of the political form of the people. While all previous forms of government had been repressive, the Commune is a “thoroughly expansive political form.”31 Marx’s rhetoric is stirring, polemically suited to struggle over the meaning of the Commune. “Commune” names aspiration and antagonism; it designates the alternative to the empire. Within the ongoing struggle over the positive realization of that alternative, Marx prioritizes one among the multiple interests that tried to see itself in the Commune form, presenting the Commune “essentially” as the political form “under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”
Analytically, Marx’s account is less satisfying insofar as it equates proletarian selfgovernment with a federal system comprised of local communes, district assemblies (comprised of delegates elected from the communes), and a National Delegation of deputies sent from these assemblies to Paris. That this arrangement presented itself does not make it uniquely suited for the emancipation of labor. Distributed and federal political arrangements have served bourgeois and imperial power quite well. Marx even acknowledges that in the Commune’s governing schema rural producers were brought under the lead of the towns, so the Commune did not eliminate repression. To the extent that “Commune” names a governing body, apparatus, or schema, one comprised of an arrangement of offices, the rules for their maintenance and distribution, as well as a set of dictates connecting this arrangement to the people it would govern, “Commune” institutionalizes some possibilities and excludes others. It puts repression to work. Marx, faithful to crowd rupture, presents the Commune as a continuation of the egalitarian moment. My point is that the institutional specificity of the political form of the Commune matters less than the fidelity of its presentation. We should attend to Marx’s rhetoric rather than his (weak) analysis. Marx’s rhetoric signals his fidelity to the egalitarian rupture of the crowd event. The Commune incites a partisan subjectivization, an event in the political expression of the working class.
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In the different accounts of the Paris Commune, the referent of “Commune” is unstable. It shifts from all of Paris, to the people of Paris who voted representatives to the Commune, to the working class, to those elected to the Commune, to those who served in it, even to particular sets of voices in the Council. While a politics can and should be traced in these shifts—for this movement is nothing but the expression and enclosure of a political subject—we might also note that the fact of shifting indexes an irreducible feature of the people as non-all, non-totalizable, and never fully present to itself. The people is only present as few, some, or many. The substitutionism about which Trotsky warned is not a danger particular to communist or working-class parties. It’s an unavoidable condition of any popular politics with emancipatory egalitarian ends. Neither people nor class (nor movement nor mass) exists as a unity. Every attempt to invoke, create, or speak in behalf of such a unity comes up against an ineliminable, constitutive division.
Instead of solving a political problem, the Commune poses one: the sovereignty of the people. Is it possible and what forms can it take? The non-all character of the people has been a consistent sticking point in democratic theory. If the people are not a unity, how can they rule themselves? How can they speak or legislate? And how do we know? The theoretical discussions occur under various headings—foundings, constituent power, and the possibility of bringing something new into being. Taking the place of the mythic social contract, the power of the people to make their own history comes up against its grounding in what cannot be other than a crime against the prior order.
In contrast, Marxist theory makes the prior order itself the crime, repeating the series of need, crime, and justice Taine associates with the crowd. The revolutionary class gives its ideas “the form of universality” and represents these ideas “as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Marx explains, “The class making revolution emerges at the outset simply because it is opposed to a class not as a class but as a representative of the whole of society.”32 This is the sense in which class struggle is a political struggle. Rather than determined within the economic conditions in which class confronts class as two distinct forces with particular interests, the class making revolution represents its interests as general over and against the particular will of the oppressing class. More precisely, class partisans and allies struggle to present the Real of the crowd’s destructive interruption as expressions of the desire of the people.
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Marx premises the revolutionary break within existing conditions of production, nevertheless Marxist theory doesn’t escape the problem of the people. Whether as the limits of working-class struggle in trade union consciousness, the failure of the masses to revolt, or the betrayals by elitist vanguard parties, Marxist theory and communist movement run up against the disorganized, disagreeable, divided people. The people resist and evade the very forms on which their political subjectivity depends. When it appears, which isn’t often, the movement for the majority isn’t necessarily in the immediate interest of the majority. Since they can never be fully present, no revolution or revolutionary movement can actually be that of the people. It always entails the imposition ofthe ideas ofsome upon many.
In sum, the Commune gives form to the break with the National Government effected by the crowd even as the people’s elusive desire propels a new subjective process, a process of inserting the people into history as an active subject and rereading history in terms of the actions of this subject.33 Interpretations of the Commune thus grapple with how to understand the power of the people. Marx suggests as much in the letter to Kugelmann that Lenin cites in State and Revolution: heroic party comrades in Paris are attempting “real people’s revolution.”34 As I argue above, the multiple, opposing treatments of the Commune are not indications of an expansive political form, and they are not reflections of specific features of institutional design. Rather, they underscore the irreducibility of the gap between the people and their political forms, the gap constitutive of the people’s subjectivity. Badiou writes, “The subject glides between the successive partial representations of that whose radical lack institutes it as articulated desire.”35 Badiou is glossing Lacan. What I find suggestive is seeing in the partial representations of the Commune traces of the people as a political subject. The point is not to fetishize rupture or celebrate the pluri-potentiality of infinite modes of becoming. It is to see in the overlap of the Commune form and the crowd event the specificity of an emancipatory egalitarian politics. Because it is a form for the expression of the people’s desire, the Commune is necessarily lacking.
The Destruction of Social Space
In her classic treatment of the Paris Commune as the transformation of social space, Kristin Ross enables us to feel the Commune as the expression of a new politics.36 This felt politics, though, is not quite the politics of a subject. It’s more a foreshadowing of the politics that hijacked and dismantled the sense that collectivity is a necessary attribute of the political subject. Ross’s Commune looks like Paris in 1968, more specifically, like the Paris Commune presented by the Situationists in their “Theses on the Commune.” The Situationists highlight the “biggest festival of the nineteenth century.” The Commune was an explosion of inventiveness, an experiment in revolutionary urbanism that, for those who lived it, was a fully consummated political experience (not a failed attempt at establishing a new form of working-class rule). This version of the Commune, developed and extended by Ross as a celebration of individuality, continues today as a key image of radical politics. It’s how we imagine revolution. And it’s what we have to get beyond, a possibility latent in Ross’s own attention to the crowd.
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For Ross, the Commune’s most profound elements are horizontality, emancipation from social division, and the politicization of everyday life. She finds the horizontality of the Commune in its “largely leaderless revolutionary government.” This horizontality manifested itself symbolically in the destruction of the Vendome column. Social divisions broke down as workers asserted themselves as artists and authors, as all governmental agents received workers’ wages, and as barricades blocked previous patterns of urban circulation and created new ones. Both horizontality and the elimination of social division figure into the politicization of everyday life as centralized state power is replaced by the Commune, a political form that did not concentrate power into an excrescence parasitic on society but operated as society’s own politicization.
Critical of what she calls “the ‘mature’ Marx, author of scientific socialism,” Ross distances the politics of the Commune from the politics of a working class inexorably marching toward communism. Exceeding the limits of class and property, the revolutionary praxis of the Commune came from its “challenge to the boundaries between work and leisure, producer and consumer, worker and bourgeois, worker and intellectual.”37 This challenge disrupts the linear, centralizing movement of capitalism’s development into communism, a disruption Marx recognizes in The Civil War in France. Ross brackets Capital in order to link Marx’s account of the civil war in France to his early critique of Hegel. The significance of Marx’s writing on the Commune, for Ross, is its acknowledgement of a displacement of politics from “a specialized set of activities, institutions, and occasions” into “concrete problems of work, leisure, housing, sexuality, and family and neighborhood relations.”38 She thus uses Marx against Marx in order to present the Commune in terms of variegated, multiform revolution traversing the social field. Ross writes, “Revolutionary struggle is diffuse as well as specifically directed, expressed throughout the various cultural spheres and institutional contexts, in specific conflicts and in the manifold transformations of individuals rather than in some rigid and polar opposition of capital and labor.”39 Revolution isn’t the expression of class struggle. It’s a matter of multiple differentiated “transformations.” In Ross’s version of revolution, what happens to an individual takes the place of what a class makes happen.
If the unique contribution of the Commune was the challenge to boundaries between work and leisure, producer and consumer, worker and bourgeois, worker and intellectual, then it pre-enacts communicative capitalism. To see in Ross’s depiction of the Commune a precursor to our mediated present isn’t even a stretch. She emphasizes the “astounding abundance of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, propaganda brochures, professions of faith, declarations of intentions, manifestos.”40 During the two months of the Commune, over seventy new periodicals were introduced. The policy of the Commune was “instant information.” Posters covered the walls of Paris. Proclamations were often read aloud to people in the streets. Cartoons, caricatures, satires, and insults —often highly sexual—circulated widely.
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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.
Ross’s account of the Commune is also an account of the crowd.41 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.”42 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.”43 The crowd decomposes the body, making the body itself become a crowd, “as if it were peopled by multiplicities.”
Ross 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.”44 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).45 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.”46 The group subject is virtual because it is a marker for a potential collectivity of unlimited individuality.
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A quarter century since Ross’s initial publication of her reading of Rimbaud, emphases on individuality and potentiality resonate less with freedom than they do with the dominion of capital. Individuality is communicative capitalism’s primary value. We are told that each of us is unique, and enjoined to amplify, advertise, and accelerate this uniqueness. Our media is personalized, and we are encouraged to personalize it even more, for example, with apps and mobile phone cases that meet our singular needs and express our singular brands. Those looking for work are advised to make themselves stand out from the crowd, to distinguish themselves from others by offering that special something that will catch an employer’s eye. Capital accumulation depends on cultivating and monetizing the new and different. In an informational milieu in which images and events are quickly absorbed in an infinite media flow, attracting and retaining attention is extraordinarily difficult. Social media experts and data analytics attempt to harvest and harness future possibilities, reminding us that coming up with a unique personal brand, getting noticed, getting heard is no simple matter. “Potential” is entrepreneurial buzzword and securitizable wager. Corporations capture it and hedge funds bet on its algorithmic variations. Individuality and potentiality point less to new experiences of freedom than to new means of entrapment within capitalist circuits.
When the group marks only the potential of unlimited individuality, it loses its political efficacy. It fails to make division appear, covering it over with the unifying screen of multiplicity.47 In Ross’s version embodied sensation replaces the collective body of the working class. Crowd affect displaces militant political association.
At the same time, Ross’s insights into Rimbaud’s figuring of the crowd suggest another reading of the crowd, one that treats the devaluation of individual subjectivity as a component of a process of collective subjectivization. Something is happening such that the capacity to say “I” is being replaced by the will to say “we.” This something is the crowd effect rupturing the individual form. In another parenthetical, Ross writes:
the anonymous, blurry face in the crowd, the “man in the street,” as we say, is always one step away from becoming “people in the streets”: the crowd, the demonstration, the insurrection. The man in the street, the indistinct element in a swarm of people, stripped of individual subjectivity, faceless, is always on the point of becoming “political man,” always just at the limit of action. 48
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Anonymity marks the de-individuation necessary for collective subjectivity, the power number exerts in excess of individual conscious decision. The blurring of distinctions that concentrated urban life provides perches cities on the brink of riot. On the one hand, insofar as a single figure stands in for a rebelling swarm, “political man” is a misnomer. On the other, that the swarm is not yet a political subject, not yet a collectivity, not yet present to itself as a provisional being highlights the indeterminacy of the crowd. Ross finds potential in the unformed. She values latency. Her rich descriptions of Rimbaud’s crowds bring out the destructuring capacities of swarms in ways that need not be rearticulated with a freeing of individuality but can instead be associated with the emergence of collective subjectivity.
Ross positions the “half-real, half-fantastic” crowd as an alternative to a politics rooted in the well-defined interests of the class. It’s not an alternative. The beautiful inbetween of infinite potentiality can’t last forever. People get tired. Some want a little predictability, reliable food sources, shelter, and medical care. Others realize they’re doing all the work. Without a politics that targets capitalists as a class, the rest of us continue to be exploited (even when this exploitation is self-exploitation). Common work, knowledge, achievements, and resources are expropriated from us and channeled into the coffers of the very, very few. Ross herself fully recognizes the brevity of the Commune moment. Two months after the March 18 uprising, twenty-five thousand Communards were slaughtered in a massacre far exceeding any of the events of the Terror.49 The crowd isn’t an alternative political arrangement; it’s the opening to a process of re-arrangement.
What Ross celebrates is the exciting cause of popular rupture with a dominant order, the crowd event that ignites a subjective process. What she avoids, sometimes disavowing, is the subject support of this process in a collective, partisan body. For example, even as Ross highlights the erasure of divisions and the proliferation of political engagements across diverse social classes, she nonetheless emphasizes the working-class nature of the Commune, as if in covert fidelity to that party that would insist on the egalitarian link between crowd discharge and Commune form. She lauds the reappropriation of drunkenness, laziness, and licentiousness on behalf of the workers against those who disparage them. A partisan position infuses Ross’s text (the foreword is by Terry Eagleton), yet she pushes it aside in a fetishistic embrace of destabilization for its own sake. She concludes: “the force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced.” At first reading this is unconvincing, requiring us to agree that the force in the Commune idea, for example, lies in its ability to be displaced and not in its expression of popular power. Any idea, image, or symbol can be displaced, resignified, reappropriated, ironically redeployed, turned into a meme. At second glance, Ross’s claim is simply wrong: the force of a brand like Coke persists in its ability to resist displacement, its capacity to retain its symbolic efficiency across multiple registers and continue to designate a knot of beverage, culture, and thirst-quenching, corporatized contemporaneity even when other words and proper names occupy the place of its brand name, as we saw at the beginning of chapter one. Better, then, is appropriating Ross’s sentence against itself: the force of an idea appears in the struggle over it, in its capacity to serve as a site worth contesting. The force expresses the subjectivity of a collective.
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