Crowds and Party by Jodi Dean

Author:Jodi Dean [Dean, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Verso
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 in-between 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

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.