Crowds and Party

16 Ibid., 78.

18 Montag, Althusser, 104.

19 Ibid., 137.

20 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 23.

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Vintage, 1979. For a schematic overview of nineteenth-century American and European individualisms, see Steven Lukes, Individualism, New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Montag argues that Althusser’s thesis that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects “only takes on its full meaning in relation” to Foucault’s description ofthe material conditions ofinterpellation in Discipline and Punish, 163–70. Noting how Foucault “opens an entire dimension that Althusser’s essay unwittingly presupposes: a history ofthe body, the history ofthe individual itself,” Montag provides further support for the utility ofinverting Althusser, 167.

28 Already in Madness and Civilization (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Vintage, 1973), Foucault describes the great confinement of the seventeenth century.

29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 142.

30 Ibid., 143.

31 Ibid., 170. Foucault notes that disciplinary power reverses the “axes of individuation.” Procedures of “ascending” individuation mark the individuated as possessing more power than others, as great and privileged. Hence, portraits are painted and tales are told of kings and nobles. Ascending individuation is not exactly an individuation. It is a glorification, a process for the generation of prestige and immortality so that the glorified is an exemplar of a group, whether that group be family, tribe, or nation.

32 Ibid., 201.

33 Ibid., 162.

34 In a nuanced discussion ofthe ways gender, race, and class become imbricated in a new notion ofindividual identity in eighteenth-century Europe, historian Dror Wahrman writes, “In the ancien régime of identity … the preference for generic categorization had meant that collective categories that identified groups had primacy over categories that identified individuals … But in the new configuration of the late eighteenth century such categories contributed to the generation ofunique identity before they generated the identicality ofa collective group, and were thus closer to the new understandings of self.” See his The Making of the Modern Self, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 278.

35 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004, 115.

36 Ibid., 86.

37 Ibid., 151–52.

38 Molly Anne Rothenberg writes, “As purely external (and discursive) productions, subject positions have no interiority from which they might mount resistance to their own conditions of determination. Where Althusser conceives of subjects as mis-recognizing (and therefore in principle capable of recognizing) the truth about their relations to real conditions oftheir production, Foucault conceives ofsubjects as nothing more than the conditions of their production and so incapable of misrecognition or recognition.” See her The Excessive Subject, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010, 26. My goal is to demonstrate the sense in which this interiority is transindividual, a crowd at the heart ofthe person.

39 Mladen Dolar, “Freud and the Political,” Theory & Event 12: 3, 2009, 15–29.

40 See Bruno Bosteels’s critique of Žižek on this point in The Actuality of Communism, London: Verso, 2011.

41 James Martel, Textual Conspiracies, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

42 See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the Mobius strip in Organs without Bodies, New York: Routledge, 2003; see also Rothenberg’s explication of the logic of the empty set as the addition of a negation, 30–45.

43 Jodi Dean, “Politics without Politics,” Parallax 15: 3, 2009, 20–36.

44 Bruno Bosteels, “Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism,” Part 2, Pli 13, 2002, 172–208, 185.

45 I provide a more extensive elaboration on this concept of the sovereignty of the people in The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2012. I am indebted to Jason Jones for discussion on this point.

46 Etienne Balibar introduces the concept of the “dif erential forms of historical individuality” already in part 3 of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2009, 282–84. Parts 1 and 2 are authored by Althusser.

47 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari raise a similar point regarding the crowded Freudian unconscious in their reading of the Wolf Man in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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48 The German title refers to Massenpsychologie. The English “group” could have been translated as “mass” or as “crowd.” Readings of the text in its relation to crowd theory vary. Serge Moscovici argues that Freud provided analytic rigor to crowd theory (The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise of Mass Psychology, trans. J. C. Whitehouse, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Daniel Pick argues for its relevance to interrogating nationalism and national identity (“Freud’s Group Psychology and the History ofthe Crowd,” History Workshop Journal 40, Autumn 1995, 39–61); Ernesto Laclau reads Freud as unifying a dualism in crowd theory (On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2007). Laclau emphasizes the notion of identification in Freud but fails to associate it with Freud’s enclosing ofthe crowd in the individual.

49 Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981, 43–44.

50 J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 242.

51 Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic, London: Sage Publications, 1975; Barrows, 162–66.

52 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001. Widely translated and reprinted, The Crowd has been credited as an originating text for social psychology. See Robert A. Nye, “Two Paths to a Psychology of Social Action: Gustave Le Bon and Georges Sorel,” Journal of Modern History 45: 3, September 1973, 411–38.

53 Le Bon, The Crowd, 10.

54 This point and the following are indebted to Barrows, Distorting Mirrors.

55 Le Bon, The Crowd, 8–9.

56 Ibid., 15.

57 Ibid., 16.

58 Jaap Van Ginneken, “The 1985 Debate on the Origins of Crowd Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21:4, Oct. 1985, 375–382; McClelland, 163-173; Barrows, 137–88.

59 See also Christian Borch and Britta Timm Knudsen, “Postmodern crowds: re-inventing crowd thinking,” introduction to a special issue ofDistinktion: Scandanavian Journal ofSocial Theory 14: 2, August 2013, 109– 13.

60 Le Bon, The Crowd, 4.

61 Ibid., 10, 73.

62 McClelland, 168. This is another point Le Bon steals from Sighele.

63 Le Bon, The Crowd, 8.

64 Ibid., 17.

65 Ibid., 13. Tarde theorizes the same phenomena under the heading of“imitation.”

66 In an analysis ofthe rise of“mass” as a sociological category in France, Stefan Jonsson identifies four (loose and overlapping) moments: mass as innumerable individuals, mass as the violent and criminal mob of the poor, mass as organized movement of workers, and, finally, mass as political sickness, the madness of all collectivity. See “The Invention of the Masses: The Crowd in French Culture from the Revolution to the Commune,” Crowds, 47–75. Eugene E. Leach recounts crowd psychology in the US, tracing the reception of the work of Le Bon and Tarde as well as the work of Boris Sidis, “America’s only original crowd psychologist,” a student of William James who linked the “mob-self” to the highly suggestible, immoral, will-less, and de-individuated “sub-waking self.” See “‘Mental Epidemics’: Crowd Psychology and American Culture, 1890–1940,” American Studies 33: 1, Spring 1992, 5–29.

67 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990, 19.

68 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. He writes, “the cleavage or division ofthe subject that psychoanalysis keeps talking about takes place against the background of unity, a unitary subject,” 6. Borch-Jacobsen presents his account as an alternative to

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Lacan’s association of desire with interdiction. He overstates the difference between them insofar as he and Lacan both conceive desire as the desire of the Other, enjoyment as indirectly accessible, and the object of desire as separate from the object-cause of desire. Žižek’s version of Lacan, moreover, suggests an even greater compatibility with Borch-Jacobsen in that he, too, emphasizes that desire has no object prior to an intervention that establishes desireability, as in, for example, Žižek’s discussions of ideology as a matrix of desire, of enjoyment as originally stolen, and of the ego ideal. Although a thorough exploration of the possible convergences is beyond the scope of my analysis, a potential benefit in Borch-Jacobsen’s emphasis on desire as imaginary is that it opens up a thinking of desire in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency, allowing for an understanding of the rivalry, hatred, and violence that Žižek associates with the alliance ofthe imaginary with the Real.

69 Ibid., 47.

70 Borch-Jacobsen writes, “The so-called subject of desire has no identity of its own prior to the identification that brings it, blindly, to occupy the point of otherness, the place of the other (who is thus not an other): an original alienation (which is thus not an alienation); and an original lure (which is thus not a lure, either).” Ibid., 48.

71 Ibid., 133.

72 Ibid., 139.

73 Le Bon, The Crowd, 30–31.

74 Freud, Group Psychology, 13.

75 Dolar, “Freud and the Political.”

76 Le Bon, The Crowd, 13.

77 Freud, Group Psychology, 7.

78 “How is it that these new characteristics are created?” Le Bon, 17; Freud, Group Psychology, 9. Borch-Jacobsen misreads Le Bon and Freud here. He treats as descriptive characteristics ofthe crowd what Freud and Le Bon present as explanations why new characteristics appear, 139. McClelland makes the same mistake, misreading the causes ofnew characteristics as the new characteristics themselves, 203.

79 Freud, Group Psychology, 9.

80 Ibid., 10.

81 Ibid., 11.

82 Ibid., 12.

83 Ibid., 15.

84 Ibid., 13.

85 Ibid., 15.

86 Le Bon. The Crowd, 90.

87 Freud, Group Psychology, 29.

88 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 157.

89 Freud, Group Psychology, 27; paragraph 40 in the original German.

90 Ibid., 33.

91 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 166–7.

92 Freud, Group Psychology, 62.

93 Ibid., 63.

94 Ibid., 68.

95 Ibid., 70.

96 Ibid., 70.

97 Ibid., 71.

98 Ibid., 72.

99 Le Bon, The Crowd, 71, 68.

100 Freud, Group Psychology, 73.

101 Ibid., 20.

102 Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 119.

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The People as Subject: Between Crowd and Party

Attention to the disruptive crowd event breaks through the impasse the individual presents to left politics. Signaling the paradoxical power of the people as political subject, the crowd presses forward unexpectedly, then dissipates. We feel the force of many, even as we know they are not all. There are always more. Insistent and opaque, the crowd illuminates attributes of political subjectivity distinctive to the contingent, heterogeneous unity of collectives, attributes missed in mistaken characterizations of the political field as consisting of individuals. Rather than a matter of deliberation, choice, and decision, politics manifests as breaks and gaps, in the unpredictability of an exciting cause, and through collective courage, directed intensity, and capacities to cohere.

This does not mean, however, that the crowd is a political subject. I argue in this chapter that the crowd rupture is the Real that incites political subjectivization. The crowd is a necessary but incomplete component of political subjectivity, the opening cut by the concentrated push of many, the disruptive power of number. Whether this push will have been an emancipatory egalitarian expression of the people as a collective political subject depends on the party. The crowd is not the people. The crowd is not a political subject. Rather, the people appear as the subject of politics when the rupture of the crowd event can be attributed to them retroactively as an effect of and in fidelity to the egalitarian crowd discharge.

What Do Crowds Want?

From the preceding chapter’s reading of the notorious Le Bon we gained an opening into political dynamics, affective flows of contagion, suggestion, and imitation that exceed the conscious will of individuals as they form a provisional being out of heterogeneous elements. Crowd phenomena are irreducible to specific “contents,” that is to say, to the ostensible topics or complaints occasioning their emergence. They have dynamics of their own, collective drives and desires. Le Bon presents the political unconscious as the crowd of diverse and indeterminate others to whom we belong and the force this belonging exerts. Sometimes the crowd is physically present. Sometimes it is not.

Freud encloses the crowd’s tumultuous belonging into the fragile yet enduring structure of the psyche. He makes one out of many, losing in the process a capacity to analyze the force of collectivity. Insofar as he treats the crowd as the product of individual desires, Freud nonetheless acquires an ability to say something about collective desire. Group ties form out of an individual’s identification with another through love for a common object.

3

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Le Bon doesn’t theorize crowd desire. He takes it as a given, enfolding it in the masses’ determination to destroy society and restore primitive communism. Crowd desire is inseparable from the will to collectivity formed out of its provisional being. The crowd phenomena that interest Le Bon define a new political era of mass political involvement. The very fact that crowds amass, that the people can be seen as having left their proper place, disrupts one social order and creates the possibility of another. What the people desire is less significant than the fact that they desire. Crowd desire registers in the concentration that negates, in the positivity of a negation of the boundaries and separations ordering social being.

Crowd observers and commentators generally react to large political crowds with combinations of anxiety and enthusiasm. Social order disrupted, anything can happen. Exemplary here is Hyppolite Taine’s account of crowds in the French Revolution. Written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, Taine’s portrayal influenced Le Bon. It continues to serve as a prototype for crowd description. We hear its echo in contemporary reports of riots. Taine describes a tumultuous buzzing swarm. “The starving, the ruffians, and the patriots all form one body, and henceforth misery, crime, and public spirit unite to provide an ever-ready insurrection for the agitators who desire to raise one.”¹ Taine’s crowd doesn’t have a politics. It’s an opportunity for politics. Need, violence and a sense of justice reinforce each other. The crowd manifests the desire of the people, but without telling us what it’s for, telling us instead that it can never be one thing, never one and never a thing, that until it is dispersed it will remain beyond satisfaction. Taine ventriloquizes in advance twenty-first-century internet commentary:

In this pell-mell of improvised politicians, no one knows who is speaking; nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the theatre, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational impressions and transports, a prey to the contagion of passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made news, growing rumours, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep outdoing each other.²

Here in the upheaval of the political crowd there is no clear or singular demand, no person of known responsibility. The setting is one of rumor without knowledge and rhetoric without basis. People in the crowd are speaking, and their collective desire exceeds what is individually spoken.

In the contemporary United States, it could seem that what the people desire most are cheap consumer goods. Our most prevalent image of crowds is that of Black Friday shoppers surging through the doors of Walmart. Ubiquitous screens feature chaotic hordes cohering through the concentration of personal wants for things before the closed doors of big box stores, but nothing that looks much like collective desire. In these crowd images, capitalism formats our setting so that only consumers and commodities appear, the consumers welded into a single mass through the erasure of social space, the commodities now so desirable as to have been magically able to effect this erasure. A fantasy of demands that goods can satisfy occupies the place of the object of collective desire. Black Friday shoppers know the role they play. Decades of media coverage have made that clear enough with interviews of bargain hunters braving bitter cold and long lines, excited in the press of bodies against glass and desperate enough to punch, kick, and grab in this scene of shopping staged as looting. That someone might be trampled to death adds to the thrill of the stampede of capitalist enthusiasm. The form of crowd action that capital expects in these spectacles of consumption—wait, press, rush—has been well established, scripted to generate a crowd energy that capital can direct and exploit.

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Late twentieth-century Britain offered a similar crowd experience for those standing in stadium terraces watching football. As Bill Buford describes it:

the physicalness was constant; it was inescapable—unless you literally escaped by leaving. You could feel, and you had no choice but to feel, every important moment of play—through the crowd. A shot on goal was a felt experience. With each effort, the crowd audibly drew in its breath, and then, after another athletic save, exhaled with equal exaggeration. And each time the people around me expanded, their rib cages noticeably inflating, and we were pressed more closely together. They had tensed up—their arm muscles flexed slightly and their bodies stiffened, or they might stretch their necks forward, trying to determine in the strange, shadowless electronic night-light if this shot was the shot that would result in a goal. You could feel the anticipation of the crowd on all sides of your body as a series of sensations.³

Buford attempts to understand the violence of English football fans, a violence not only of fighting (beating, kicking, knifing) and property damage (smashing, burning, throwing), but also of crush, stampede, collapse, and suffocation. Crowd violence is more a product of design, architecture, patterns of ticketing and transportation than it is a spontaneous expression of anger.

A crowd forms in a place. It depends on the boundedness of a setting to concentrate its intensity. On the one hand, the boundaries demarcate the permissible: “the crowd can be here, but not there.”⁴ They establish the divisions that en-form the crowd. On the other, these very limits invite transgression, directing the crowd’s attention. They provide the thresholds that, once crossed, enable the crowd to feel its strength and renew its assertion of power. Buford attends to this crowd feeling, the exhilarating moment when a sense of individuality is obliterated as all the mediators of social interchange that maintain our separateness give way to the “jubilant authority of suddenly being in a crowd.”⁵ Charge, atmosphere, pressure, expectation, excitement: the affective sensibility of the collective becomes desirable in itself, the shared sense of the power of numbers. This sense lets us construe the crowd as the positivity of negation, a positive expression of the negation of individuality, separateness, boundaries, and limit.

The Egalitarian Discharge

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Buford’s depiction of the violent crowds associated with English football supporters repeats key elements of Elias Canetti’s classic work, Crowds and Power. I mentioned in chapter one that Canetti associates the crowd with a primal fear, the fear of being touched, particularly by the strange or unknown. Only in a crowd—the denser the better —is this fear shed. “As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch,” Canetti writes. “Suddenly, it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched.” The crowd provisionally coalesces into its heterogeneous being. Norms of appropriate proximity dissolve. Conventional hierarchies collapse. In place of the distinctions mobilized to produce the individual form, there is a temporary being of multiple mouths, anuses, stomachs, hands, and feet, a being comprised of fold upon fold oftouching skin.

Canetti describes the moment of the crowd’s emergence as the “discharge.” This is the point when “all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.”⁶ Up until that point, there may be a lot of people, but they are not yet that concentration of bodies and affects that is a crowd. Density, though, as it increases, has libidinal effects:

In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself, and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.⁷

Canetti gives us the crowd as a strange attractor ofjouissance, a figure of collective enjoyment.⁸ The libidinal energy of the crowd binds it together for a “blessed moment,” a moment Canetti renders as a “feeling of equality” in the shared intensity of belonging. The feeling won’t last. Inequality will return with the dissipation of the crowd. Very few give up the possessions and associations that separate them (those who do form what Canetti terms “crowd crystals”). But in the orgasmic discharge, “a state of absolute equality” supplants individuating distinctions.⁹

Canetti’s crowd equality has nothing to do with Freud’s imaginary equality of rivals. Nor does it resemble bourgeois equality of the sort Marx excoriates in “The Critique of the Gotha Program.” This is not the formal equality of a common standard applied to different people, objects, or expenditures of labor. Rather, the equality Canetti invokes is one where “a head is a head, an arm is an arm, and the differences between individual heads and arms is irrelevant.”¹⁰ De-individuation accompanies intense belonging. Just as Marx parenthetically notes that unequal individuals “would not be different individuals if they were not unequal,” so does Canetti associate inequality with differentiation, with the siphoning off of the fluid, mobile substance of collectivity into the form of distinct individuals. The force of equality in the crowd breaks down the always fragile and imaginary enclosure of the individual form, enabling the collective to experience its collectivity. Canetti argues that the crowd’s equality infuses all demands for justice. Equality as belonging—not separation, weighing, and measure—is what gives “energy” (Canetti’s term) to the longing for justice. As I argue below, a communist party organizes fidelity to this equality, this justice, this blessed moment of joyous belonging.

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Too many castigate the crowd for its destructiveness without looking into why the crowd destroys. Canetti associates destructiveness with the discharge, almost as if the crowd were crying out in ecstasy: “the noise of destruction adds to its satisfaction.” Sounds of shattering glass augment the jubilation of the crowd, testifying to its strength prolonging enjoyment by promising continued growth and movement: “the din is the applause of objects.”¹¹ Particularly satisfying is the destruction of boundaries. Nothing is off limits because there are no limits. The windows and doors that make houses into separate spaces, spaces for individuals apart from the crowd, are smashed.

In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries.¹²

Canetti’s crowd desires. It wants to grow, to increase and spread. It will persist as long as it is moving toward a goal. In addition to equality and density, then, Canetti attributes to crowds traits suggestive of what psychoanalysis treats as desire: growth and direction. The urge to increase is a push to be more, to eliminate barriers, to universalize and extend the crowd feeling such that nothing is outside it. Direction intensifies equality by providing a common goal. If the crowd is to continue to exist, the goal must remain unattained. Expressed in Lacanian terms: desire is a desire to desire.

In the contemporary United States, political crowds, crowds authorized by neither capital nor the state, rarely manifest out of doors. Increase seems a desire limited to capital. 2011 was a year of hope and disruption because protesters from Madison, Wisconsin and then the multiple Occupy encampments shot a hole in the wall of expectations that enabled us to glimpse radical collective possibilities. For the most part, though, political crowds occur elsewhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, even Canada. The December 2, 2013 headlines for the news program Democracy Now! expressed this status quo as they highlighted the thousands demonstrating in the occupied territories against potential Israeli expulsion of Bedouin Arabs, the thousands rallying in Honduras for an election recall, the tens of thousands protesting in Mexico against their president, the hundreds of thousands in Ukraine protesting the government’s refusal to boost ties to the EU, and the “Republican Tweet Mocked for Racist Claim.” The Republican National Committee had tweeted a photo of Rosa Parks with the message: “Today we honor Rosa Park’s bold stand and her role in ending racism.” Thousands retweeted it with the hashtag #RacismEndedWhen.

In the Democracy Now! headlines, domestic social media snark, contained in and channeled through networked communications, appears at the same level as mass protests in other countries as if to stand in for the missing crowd, the many invoked in terms like “crowd-sourcing.” Yet again political energy is captured in communicative capitalism’s circuits of drive. But this contained and limited media moment still indicates the necessity of the crowd for politics. The millions of repetitions under a common name—marked by the hashtag—push back against the Republican Party’s rebranding efforts, demonstrating its failure to comprehend ongoing racism in the US. For a little while, the Twitter crowd turns lack into a common object. They disorder the Republican social media plan, their intrusion via a common name denegating the minimal difference of communicative capitalism’s personalized media. Their force comes from their provisional being-many-as-one—until it is swept back into the engulfing media flow. Even here, even in communicative capitalism’s virtual crowds, we can glimpse an expression of crowd desire, a desire irreducible to either a specific object or specific individuals counted up as the force of their aggregation counts for nothing. Social media is thus a second site of permissible, laudable increase: everyone wants more friends, forwards, and followers.

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Crowds exert force or, better, they are a force of desire exerted by collectivity. When they amass in spaces authorized by neither capital nor the state, they breach the given, installing a gap of possibility. The presence of a crowd is a positive expression of negation. People act together in ways impossible for individuals, a phenomenon that preoccupied the early twentieth-century crowd theorists. Pushing against dominant arrangements, the crowd prefigures a collective, egalitarian possibility—but “prefigures” in a completely literal way: “prior to figuration.” The crowd by itself, unnamed, doesn’t represent an alternative; it cuts out an opening by breaking through the limits bounding permitted experience. It mis-assembles what is present and threatens what is not yet there (I say “mis-assemble” because “assemble” would imply order and “dis-assemble” would imply destruction without subjectivization). People are there, but, through the active desire of the crowd, differently from how they were before, combined into a state of such absolute equality that “differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant.”¹³ Together, previously separate people impress the possibility of the people as the collective subject of a politics.

The energy of the crowd opens to political subjectivity, but it is not the same as political subjectivity. It’s necessary but insufficient, an incomplete part of a politics not yet the politics of a part, half a split subject. For the crowd to become the people, representation is necessary, representation faithful to equality, to the “blessed moment” of the discharge. Some on the Left—autonomists, insurrectionists, anarchists, and libertarian communists—so embrace the energy unleashed by the crowd that they mistake an opening, an opportunity, for an end. They imagine the goal of politics as the proliferation of multiplicities, potentialities, differences. The unleashing of the playful, carnivalesque, and spontaneous is taken to indicate political success, as if duration were but a multiplication of moments rather than itself a qualitative change. For the fantasists of politics as beautiful moment, any interpretation of a crowd event is to-be-contested because of its unavoidable incompleteness, its partiality. They forget, or disavow, the fact that the non-all character of the people is the irreducible condition of struggle. And so they treat organization, administration, and legislation as a failure of revolution, a return of impermissible domination and hierarchy rather than as effects and arrangements of power, rather than as attributes of the success of a political intervention.

The politics of the beautiful moment is no politics at all. Politics combines the opening with direction, with the insertion of the crowd disruption into a sequence or process that pushes one way rather than another. There is no politics until a meaning is announced and the struggle over this meaning begins. Most of us have experiences in everyday life that confirm this point: we come across a bunch of people in an unexpected place and want to know what’s going on. What are they doing, what is everybody looking at, why are police there? Have we come across a protest, a crime, an accident, a film set? Explanations of what is happening may diverge. Their divergence, the conflict between accounts, marks the political division. Insistence on remaining within the infantile fantasy of the beautiful moment of indeterminacy attempts to forestall politics and its necessary division. Even more, it denies or even betrays the crowd’s expression of equality, the collective desire for collectivity that incites the crowd.

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