Crowds and Party

What’s at stake here is less MacPherson’s reading of Hobbes and Locke (which is contestable), than his highlighting of liberalism’s mutual constitution of individual and owner. Ownership relies on and is produced through a series of separations and enclosures. Capacities are separate from others as well as separate from a self, which encloses these capacities within its person. Instead of entailing collective reproduction for common good, training—whether moral or technical—is work on and for the self. Cut off from the settings that produce and enable them and enclosed within the individual, capacities are objects of individual concern, so many objects available for exchange and, as capitalism expands, for investment, stylization, and branding.

Although liberal theory treats the individual as an owner and therefore a locus of freedom, the codependence of the commodity form and the individual form works in another direction as well, one that enables elision between commodity and individual. In his gripping account of the antebellum slave trade in the United States, Walter Johnson describes the importance of individuation in the dismantling of slave families and the categorizing and fashioning of slaves for the market. Johnson writes, “On the one hand, they were to be transformed into exemplars of the category to which they had been assigned; but once the categories of comparison had been established and embodied, the slaves were supposed to once again become visible as individuals.”⁴ To be priced, slaves had to be comparable. To be sold, they had to be distinctive enough, individuated enough, to stand out from the crowd. The individuality of the marketed slave was produced for purchase.

The elision between commodity and individual evidenced in the slave trade demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily or essentially liberating about the individual form. As I consider below, it emerges historically as an ideological mechanism for the de-subjectification of collectives. The individual—and, as we shall see, not only in its liberal, possessive variety—is a form of capture.

The Subject Is Interpellated as an Individual

Louis Althusser’s reworking of the Marxian notion of ideology presents the category of the subject as constitutive of ideology. It is constitutive of ideology because the function of ideology is “‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”⁵ This function, Althusser argues, is a characteristic of ideology in general; ideology “transforms” individuals into subjects. He names the operation at work in this transformation “interpellation.” Presenting interpellation as a “hail” or call, Althusser illustrates it with a policeman shouting “hey, you there!” and a person turning around in response. With this turn-inresponse, the individual becomes a subject: “he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”⁶ Interpellation, then, is a process of subjection. Becoming subject, the individual both takes on and comes under ideology’s structure of beliefs and expectations.

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Althusser’s account of interpellation does not imply that there are individuals “out there” prior to interpellation. Invoking Freud and the rituals and expectations accompanying the birth of a child, “that happy event,” he insists that an “an individual is always-already a subject, even before she is born.”⁷ A child is born into a structure that has already subjected it, a structure that gives it a name, a sex, and a place and expects it to fill this place, be this sex, and carry this name to become the subject it already is.

The example of the hail notwithstanding, ideological interpellation is not a singular event. It is constant and ongoing, embedded in material practices of recognition and misrecognition “which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, unmistakable and, naturally, irreplaceable subjects.”⁸ As Elizabeth Wingrove writes, Althusser’s theory of ideology thus explains how actors’ “subjectivity—which is to say, their awareness of themselves as unique, (relatively independent), and capable of making choices—is achieved and sustained by virtue of their subjection to the rules, practices, and relations of the multiple apparatuses within a given social formation.”⁹ Subjectivity—or individuality, which in Althusser’s discussion is the same thing—is an effect of the larger ideological material structure.

One of the most influential of Althusser’s contributions, the idea of ideological interpellation has come under significant criticism.¹⁰ Paul Hirst points out that “Althusser’s concept of subject supposes that subjects and individuals correspond; that the subject is the unitary ‘identity’ of the individual, that the subject effect corresponds to the classic philosophical conception of consciousness.”¹¹ Judith Butler highlights the “unelaborated doctrine of conscience” underpinning Althusser’s description of the individual’s turn in response to the hail, finding there “a guilty embrace of the law.”¹² And Jacques Rancière criticizes the Althusserian theory of ideology for its exclusion of class struggle, its positing of a function for ideology independent of the existence of classes.¹³ He charges Althusser with missing what was already clear to Marx: ideological forms “are the forms in which a struggle is fought out.”¹⁴

Approaching Althusser from the perspective of psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar challenges yet another line of critique, one which faults Althusser for positing a “clean cut,” a sudden passage from the individual—“a pre-ideological entity, a sort of material prima”—to the subject.¹⁵ This critique misses its mark, Dolar argues, because the real problem with Althusser’s version of subjectivization is that the subject’s illusory belief in its own autonomy is never as total as Althusser implies. Interpellation itself produces a remainder for which Althusser cannot account. Psychoanalysis proceeds from this remainder, the flaw at the heart of the individual subject. Dolar writes, “For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails. The illusion of autonomy may well be necessary, but so is its failure; the cover-up never holds fast.”¹⁶ As Slavoj Žižek emphasizes, the difference between the Althusserian and psychoanalytic views of the subject is that psychoanalysis emphasizes the ineliminable gap between ideology and individual. It does so not to naturalize an individual specificity perpetually out of ideology’s reach but to treat the subject itself as nothing but this gap.¹⁷

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My wager is that Althusser got it backwards. Ideological interpellation makes more sense as a theory of individuation than as a theory of subjection (which would account for the identity of subject and individual that remained a thorny problem in Althusser’s different theorizations of ideology).¹⁸ Warren Montag provides support for this inversion. He highlights Althusser’s claim that ideology “recruits” its bearers: “individuals are picked from an undifferentiated mass, singled out, removed from it and endowed with a unique identity, as if such a singling out or separation of individuals were necessary to the functioning of the economy.”¹⁹ Confronting a crowd or mass, the ideological hail fragments it into singular elements. Montag notes the specific resonance of Althusser’s use of the term “interpellate” in the context of the protests and demonstrations of the 1960s. One would be stopped by the police “and therefore singled out from the crowd or singularized in relation to a background.”²⁰ What was a crowd becomes so many separable individuals.

Rather than following Althusser’s emphasis on ideology in general, inverting his claim to attend to the interpellation of the subject as an individual narrows the focus to bourgeois ideology (and thereby returns class conflict to the theory of ideology). I use “bourgeois ideology” to refer to the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The Protestant Reformation exemplifies bourgeois ideology’s interpellation of the subject as an individual. Breaking with the communality of Catholicism, Protestant theologies hail believers as singular souls responsible for their own salvation. Effects of the interpellation of the subject as an individual include the reduction of agency to individual capacity, freedom to individual condition, and property to individual possession. They include as well the supposition that aggregates groups, tribes, collectivities, and crowds—are unavoidably primitive, barbaric, irrational, and atavistic.

The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not preconstrained to the individual form, a form that psychoanalysis teaches is always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. With this reversal, the individual form itself becomes a problem, the coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives.²¹

Althusser’s claim that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” should be reread with the emphasis on individuals. What is imaginary is that the conditions ideology organizes relate primarily to an individual. The individual is itself an imaginary figure, as we learn from Lacan. 22

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Bourgeois ideology treats conditions that are collective and social—embedded in histories of violence and systems of exploitation—as if they were relationships specific to an individual, as if states arose through individual consent, as if politics were a matter of individual choice, and as if desires and capacities, affects and will naturally originate from and reside in an individual form. But just as collective experience of antagonism—the “social substance”—underlies what Marx calls the “phantom-like objectivity” of the commodity, so too does it underlie the phantom-like subjectivity of the individual.

Enclosing the Common

Inverting Althusser helps us conceive the individual as a form of enclosure. As Marx describes in Capital, enclosure is an operation through which what is common is seized and put into service for capitalism. Judith Butler’s account of the constitution of the subject in language, an account that itself draws from Althusser, provides a way to access this operation insofar as the linguistic category of the subject designates a condition ofcommon belonging.²³

Butler writes,

The genealogy of the subject as a critical category … suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject … The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency.²⁴

That individuals come to occupy the place of the subject implies that more than one necessarily occupies this place at the same time. Because “subject” is the linguistic condition for intelligibility and its function is to hold open a place, the utterly singular and unique would have no place. The utterly singular would be illegible within the available terms of existence and agency. “Individual” thus designates a specific occupation of the subject understood as a common place. As a subject, the individual can only be one occupant among many. The singularity of its subject-status is purely imaginary. “Subject” is a condition for agency because the individuality of agency is a fantasy occluding the material and collective conditions for action, contracting them into an imaginary ego.

Butler associates the individual’s occupation of the position of the subject, its subjection, with foreclosure.²⁵ As the individual is subjectified, it loses something of itself (even if this is something it never had). To be a subject is to be, in a way, bereft. Butler suggests that the subject is a condition of freedom at the cost of freedom, where this lost or sacrificed freedom is a kind of authenticity or potential for love and desire that would be available to the subject were it not for the law to which the subject is beholden: “One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.”²⁶ Understanding the subject as interpellated as an individual, however, opens up another possibility. The bereavement accompanying interpellation arises from the loss of others. The individual is the one cut off from, cut out of, the collective. Caught in the isolation of the imaginary ego, the individual tries to do and be alone what she can only do and be with others.

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Already in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault treats the individual as an effect of power and knowledge as he details the making of the individual through the extension of disciplinary formulae of domination in eighteenth-century Europe.²⁷ Discipline involves a range of mutually reinforcing techniques employed to solve the problem collective people create for authority. The state needs the army, but an armed assembly of the people can overthrow the state. Capital needs labor, but the concentrated power of the workers can render useless, destroy, and effectively abolish capitalist investment in raw material and means of production. Over the course of the eighteenth century, processes of enclosing, partitioning, functionalizing, and ranking spread throughout the social to turn the motley, amorphous, unruly mass into a docile, useful, combination of forces. Vagabonds and paupers are confined.²⁸ Workers are closed off into factories. A monastic model becomes the ideal for secondary schools. The “army, that vagabond mass,” is regularized into a more regimented military, separated into barracks in order to prevent looting and violence.²⁹ The enclosed are then partitioned off from one another: “Each individual has his own place; and each place is individual. Avoid distribution in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyze confused, massive or transient pluralities.”³⁰

As Foucault makes clear, enclosure and segmentation accompany not only technological developments, the punctuation and measuring of time, and the correlation of bodies and gestures, but also important changes in the work of power on bodies. These changes in the mode of power’s operation on bodies increase opportunities to observe and gain knowledge of them and to put this knowledge to use in securing their combined utility and docility. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals,” Foucault writes.³¹ “The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.”³² Observed and compared, bodies, aptitudes, and capacities are individuated as they are “classified in relation to one another.” Evaluated and rewarded, they shed their quality as mass and take shape as trained, specified, and knowable individuals.³³ As an effect of the enclosure of the crowd, individuation is fundamentally and deliberately—depoliticizing, the fantasies of liberals notwithstanding.³⁴ Put back in terms of a question Althusser poses in his discussion of ideological state apparatuses: “What do children learn at school?” They learn that they are individuals.

Silvia Federici deepens and extends Foucault’s account of the material production of the individual in modern Europe. Tracing the peasant uprisings, popular heresies, and witch hunts inseparable from the bloody processes of capital accumulation, Federici connects the disciplinary enclosure of the workforce with the “accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.”³⁵ She attends to demographic and economic crises in the first decades of the seventeenth century (crises involving dramatic population declines in Europe and the New World and leading to the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade), situating there the emergence of reproduction and population growth as matters of intellectual and state concern.³⁶ A particular focus of the mercantilists, state preoccupation with population growth results in attempts to expropriate from women their reproductive labor, rendering them literally and physically a source of labor power as it differentiates between men’s and women’s work, devalues the work ofwomen, and demonizes their knowledge ofreproduction and the body. Moreover, as the ruling classes endeavor to impose ever stricter discipline on an unruly workforce, inefficient social activities like gaming and drinking come under heavy scrutiny and regulation; unproductive sexuality is forbidden.

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Federici affiliates these developments with the rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes. She attributes the popularity of Cartesianism among middle- and upper-class Europeans to its provision of a model of self-management crucial for capitalism’s need for a reliable, predictable, and calculable workforce. Cartesianism provides “a new model of the person,” where the self works on its self, training, controlling, and stylizing its body, now configured as something other, something possessed. “The product of this alienation from the body,” Federici writes, “was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as ‘otherness’ from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it.” As she concludes, this emergence of an alter ego represents “the birth of the individual in capitalist society.”³⁷ Rather than belonging to the world, the world exists in order to belong to it.

Foucault’s and Federici’s explorations into the disciplinary production of the individual supply ample reason to replace the idea of the individual’s interpellation as a subject with that of the subject’s interpellation as an individual. The individual is a product of European modernity, the form through which collective economic force is politically secured so as to facilitate the processes of its own exploitation. Bourgeois ideology, manifest in the disciplinary techniques that make individuals, hails the collective subject, the mass of workers, vagabonds, soldiers, and students, as individuals (even as the capacity of the common people for individuated self-discipline in the service of capital accumulation and liberal order will persist as a problem). It singles out and separates, producing the very individuals it extracts.

Nonetheless, Foucault cannot explain how disciplinary techniques and processes subjectify or de-subjectify the individuated.³⁸ Where is the gap of subjectivity in the web of its determinations? We gain an understanding of bourgeois ideology’s regime of individuation at the cost of the foreclosed collective. Federici takes a step toward such an explanation when she gestures to an emergent alter ego—an incomplete individuation or individual that remains somehow plural. Psychoanalysis, built around the failures of the individual form, helps carry the explanation further. “For psychoanalysis there is no such thing as an individual,” Dolar writes. “The individual only makes sense as a knot of social ties, a network of relations to others, to the always already social Other, the Other being ultimately but a shorthand for the social instance as such.”³⁹ Below, I turn to Freud’s discussion of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as a resource for a psychoanalytically attuned inquiry into political subjectivization, excavating from his

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The Subject Is the Gap in the Structure

Before I turn to Freud, however, I want to mention an additional advantage to rethinking ideology as the interpellation of the subject as an individual, namely, making political sense out of the idea from Dolar and Žižek that the subject is nothing but the gap in the structure. Because Althusser takes as his problem the compliance of individuals with a system that oppresses them, he has trouble conceiving the system as itself a social product (or product of conflict). Institutions are external to the subjects they produce. Dolar and Žižek, in presenting the limits of interpellation as the subject, could be seen as making the problem worse in that they have to posit the continuity of interpellating institutions that always fail. After all, they suggest that the subject as such is hysterical, resisting the interpellative hail, perpetually refusing the identity offered to her. How, though, would an institution continue if its hail were persistently resisted?

One possible answer would be that the subject is rare, the unique individual (or individual in the moment of uniqueness), the heroine capable of going to the limit, doing the impossible. Institutions would then be understood as persisting because most of the time they work, but this working is not through the successful production of subjects; it’s through the production of objects. Another answer would shift registers altogether, reconceptualizing the problem in terms of the concept of subjectivity: if for Althusser subjectivity consists in the identity that emerges in response to the hail, for Dolar and Žižek subjectivity consists in the gap produced and occluded by answering the hail. These two options of unique or void, unconditioned or ineliminable, are politically unsatisfying.⁴⁰ Politics diminishes into waiting for the impossible arrival of one who cannot make much of a difference anyway.⁴¹ Fortunately, these are not the only options.

Reversing Althusser’s formulation so as to understand ideology as interpellating the subject as an individual provides another option: the subject emerges where ideology fails because the subject is collective. When bourgeois ideology fails, individuation fails and the fact of collectivity impresses itself. A problem faced by one becomes a condition shared by many. Correspondingly, the subject is a gap in the structure because the people are the subject of politics. “Subject” is therefore not primarily a linguistic site of individual freedom, decision, or choice. Nor does it index the unconscious fantasies that fill in and direct the never complete structure. Rather, subject is a gap in three other intertwined senses: structure’s inability to ground or posit itself, its dependence on something external to it, and the torsion of the Real in the excess of its self-relation.⁴²

In their self-relating, the people always come up against themselves. They encounter the practical, material limits of their association, the psychic and affective pressures of their commonality, and the effects of histories of conflict and conquest. The excess of their reflective relation to themselves as the people is the torsion of politics. Politics takes place in the non-identity, gap, or torsion between people and their selfgovernance.⁴³ Political subjectivization involves forcing this non-identity, making it felt as an effect of a subject. As Bruno Bosteels puts it in a discussion of Alain Badiou, “subject consists in the coherence of a forced lack.”⁴⁴ But not just any gap is that of the subject. Subject appears through the active occupation of the constitutive lack in the people.

account the collectivity enclosed in the individual.

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There is politics because the political subject is collective and it is split. This split is practical and material, the condition of our physical being. The people can never be politically (or, differently put, the “people” is not an ontological category). They are only present as parts, as subsets. This is the case with crowds occupying public squares, elected assemblies, armies in battle, and opinion polls. All are necessarily parts. Their partiality—the gap between parts and (imaginary) whole—is the exciting cause of political subjectivization. Moreover, even as parts, the people are only present temporarily. They may try to inscribe their presence, their having been, in documents, practices, and organizations which will take their place and operate in their stead, a taking and operating which is also and unavoidably partial. Some degree of alienation is unavoidable: making something ourselves, building collectives, creating new institutions cannot eliminate the minimal difference between the collectivity and the people. The condition of politics, then, is this practical material split between the people and the collective that actually comes together. Expressed in Rousseauian terms: the general will does not follow from the will of all.

The split in the people is also an effect of the group on its members in the sense that the people are never fully identical with their sovereignty. Groupness exerts a force that is more than the sum of individual expectation. The expectations of groups work back upon their members. People have them of each other as well as of themselves, and they have them of each other and themselves in ways of which they are never fully conscious. This excess manifests itself in the point of reference from which a collectivity views itself as a collective, a point sometimes occupied by a leader or held in place by a proper or common name. A name forces a gap in the collectivity it names, inscribing the non-all character of the collectivity and providing a new terrain of struggle: we argue over the name. The common name can never fully designate—capture and enclose—the collectivity even as the collectivity cannot relate to itself absent a structuring form.⁴⁵

The split in the people goes all the way down. It can’t be limited to the idea that some are excluded from the people (and hence that including them would solve the problem of the gap). Nor can it be rendered as the problem of representation (and hence addressed via ontology). Rather, the people do not know what they want. They are not fully present to themselves. Conflicting and contradictory desires and drives render the people a split subject perpetually pushing to express, encounter, and address its own non-knowledge. Returning to the idea given by Žižek and Dolar, as the collective subject of politics the people is nothing but this gap.

I have proposed an inversion of the Althusserian account of ideology and suggested some of the conceptual benefits that accompany it. An understanding of the subject as interpellated as an individual resonates with linguistic ideas of the subject, better fits with Althusser’s own description of ideological recruitment, and attends to the historicity of the individual in bourgeois modernity.⁴⁶ Even more, it lets us begin to explore the gaps constitutive of collective subjectivity and thereby further loosen the grip of the individual form. Insofar as he fails to uncouple subject and individual and consider the crowd out of which the hailed individual is recruited, Althusser naturalizes enclosure. To be sure, he is working on the terrain of a psychoanalysis that has already enclosed the collective subject in the individual form. If we turn to Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, we can see how this enclosing is accomplished. There Freud presents the individual form as a product of the enclosure of the crowd.⁴⁷ A return to Freud, and to his primary interlocutor in Group Psychology, the notorious Gustave Le Bon, reanimates the crowd as it highlights the displacement of many by one. Attending to this crowd contributes to the dismantling of the phantom-like subjectivity of the individual by locating in the crowd the dynamics of a collective subject.

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The Unconscious Is a Crowd

In Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (1921), Freud concerns himself with man as a member, man in his belonging to: how is it that that to which man belongs, belongs to him? These concerns lead Freud to discuss problems of identification, attachment, and the intensification of affect.

Freud’s turn to group psychology brings psychoanalysis into dialogue with crowd theory, a field of work emerging in late nineteenth-century social science out of discussions in biology, criminology, psychology, and sociology and out of fears incited by the revolutionary crowds of the Paris Commune of 1871.⁴⁸ Crowd theorists wanted to understand what they saw as the dangerous irrationality of the crowd, why people in large groups seemed to become more emotional, instinctual, and even primitive. In predisciplinary or even interdisciplinary style, crowd theorists used evolution to rank human civilizations, hypnosis to explain imitation in groups, and medicine to diagnose crowd pathology.⁴⁹ At the time of Freud’s intervention, crowd theory was well established and widely accepted. Freud enters the conversation as a way to expand the influence of the newer field of psychoanalysis by demonstrating how psychoanalysis better accounts for group behavior.⁵⁰

While he engages several different crowd theorists, Freud relies most heavily on the work of Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon was a pessimistic conservative who presented his racist, elitist, and misogynist ideas as scientific discoveries.⁵¹ His immensely popular 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, consolidated literary and historical accounts of the crowd from Émile Zola and Hyppolite Taine with work on criminal crowds from Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde.⁵² The Crowd announced to its readers that they were entering an Era of Crowds (capitalization in the original). It instructed them to fear it. It was certainly possible, Le Bon warned, “that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.”⁵³ The masses were now in charge and the most likely result

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was the collapse of civilization.

The Crowd appeared at a time of increasing worker militancy.⁵⁴ In France, the number of workers in syndicates tripled between 1890 and 1900. The number of strikes quadrupled over two decades. In 1886, in the dramatic miners’ strike in Decazeville, workers threw a deputy director of the company out of a window; he was then mauled to death by the crowd. In 1890, plans for massive May Day demonstrations prompted the government to garrison 38,000 troops in Paris to avert what some feared would be a resurgence of the Commune. Le Bon offered his theory of the crowd as guidance for understanding this new era even though he thought little could be done to shape it. His subsequent fascist admirers try to disprove this second point by drawing from his work in their efforts to stir and channel mass feeling.

Le Bon’s account of crowds arises out of his antipathy toward the transformation of the popular classes into governing classes. Lamenting that the “divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings,” Le Bon decries the way association, far more than universal suffrage, is making the masses conscious of their strength. They are founding syndicates and labor unions, before which authorities capitulate. They aim to limit the hours of labor, nationalize mines, railways, factories, and soil, equalize the distribution of products, and eliminate the upper classes. The claims of the masses, Le Bon warns, “amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization.”⁵⁵ Le Bon’s findings confirmed and amplified already intense anxieties among the elite.

A primary concern of the nineteenth-century crowd theorists was how it was that law-abiding individuals could act like criminals when they were combined together in a crowd. Le Bon’s answer is that a crowd is a new collective being. Assembly into a crowd results in new psychological characteristics as all the thoughts and feelings of the collectivity are turned in an identical direction.⁵⁶ Under conditions that Le Bon attributes to “exciting causes,” something emerges that is not present in individuals alone, “just as in chemistry, certain elements, when brought into contact—bases and acids, for example—combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.”⁵⁷ Despite his claims to originality, Le Bon steals this idea from Sighele, who had been involved in a public dispute with Tarde over who deserved credit for originating crowd theory.⁵⁸ Plagiarizing both, Le Bon schematizes the tropes that had by that time become inseparable from the crowd concept—contagion, suggestion, affective intensification, and de-individualization.⁵⁹

The vehicle for Le Bon’s schematization is the unconscious. He writes, “The substitution of the unconscious actions of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”⁶⁰ It is this emphasis on the unconscious that provides the opening for psychoanalysis. In Group Psychology, Freud joins the crowd theory discussion via a twist: not only is the crowd unconscious but the unconscious is itself a crowd. Freud thus accepts Le Bon and inverts Le Bon. The inversion is possible because Le Bon’s own concept of the crowd is psychological.

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