Crowds and Party

Jodi Dean

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781781687062
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781687666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state-such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world-they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise-they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.

1

Nothing Personal

The era of communicative capitalism is an era of commanded individuality. The command circulates in varying modes. Each is told, repeatedly, that she is unique and encouraged to cultivate this uniqueness. We learn to insist on and enjoy our difference, intensifying processes of self-individuation. No one else is like us (like me). The “do-it-yourself” injunction is so unceasing that “taking care of oneself” appears as politically significant instead of as a symptom of collective failure—we let the social safety net unravel—and economic contraction—in a viciously competitive job market we have no choice but to work on ourselves, constantly, just to keep up. Required to find out, decide, and express it all ourselves, we construe political collectivity as nostalgia for the impossible solidarities of a different era. The second-wave feminist idea that the “personal is political” has become twisted into the presumption that the political is personal: how does this affect me?

Individualism has not always been so intense and unmitigated. As Jefferson Cowie details in his history of the United States in the 1970s, “reformed and diversified individualisms” undermined class-based approaches to economic rights over the course of the decade.¹ This chapter takes up this assault on collectivity. Looking at shifts in commanded individuality from the 1970s to the present, I highlight the enormous strains placed on the individual as it becomes the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities—the survivor. I revisit Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, marking the ways capitalist processes simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends. Putting later sociologists in conversation with Lasch, I draw out the limits of Lasch’s account. Even as Lasch’s descriptions of celebrity culture, competition, and consumerism still resonate, individualism is today less an indication of narcissism than it is of psychosis. The chapter continues by considering a left example of the off-loading of responsibility onto the individual: the debate over the “new times” in Marxism Today that took place at the end of the 1980s. Against the background of the sociologists’ conversation, the emphases on individual responsibility and identity in this debate appear as what they in fact were: the fragmentation of a collective perspective under the weight of reasserted capitalist class power. The last sections of the chapter begin an inversion that will be more fully developed in chapter two. They find possibilities of collectivity in the ruptures of the fragile individual form. With help from Elias Canetti’s indispensable study of crowds, I introduce the power of the many and the relief it provides from the unbearable demand for individuality. My goal in the chapter is documenting an interlinked psychic and economic problem: the incapacity and contradictions of the individual form as a locus for creativity, difference, agency, and responsibility. Together with chapter two, this chapter aims to dislodge from left thinking the individualism that serves as an impasse to left politics.

Two commercials illustrate the celebration of personal uniqueness characteristic of communicative capitalism. Both are for soft drinks. Both, in different ways, engage the limits conditioning the very individuality that they command.

On January 9, 2012, Dr Pepper announced a new advertising campaign, “Always One of a Kind.” The campaign’s first commercial features hundreds of people in red t-shirts with white lettering converging in a crowd to march down streets and through a park. The t-shirts have slogans like “I’m One of a Kind,” “I’m a Cougar,” “I’m a Fighter,” and “I’m a Pepper” (one of Dr Pepper’s earlier slogans). The commercial’s soundtrack is a cover of the 1968 Sammy Davis, Jr. hit, “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” According to the press release accompanying the campaign’s launch, the red t-shirt wearers are Dr Pepper fans “proudly showing off their own original expressions on t-shirts describing what makes them unique and different from the rest of the crowd.”² In the optimistic words of the company’s director of marketing, the campaign “should serve as a catalyst for expressing originality and being authentically you.” Dr Pepper also offered fans the “opportunity to express their originality by ordering their own ‘Always One of a Kind’ t-shirts on DrPepper.com.”

Putting aside the designation of customers as “fans,” the targeted demographic appears to be people who want to express their uniqueness. The commercial hails them as individuals, inviting them to identify with particular slogans and identities. Within Dr Pepper’s commercial imaginary, going to the streets isn’t collective rage; it’s individual self-expression, an opportunity to assert one’s individuality and stand out. Crowds are that against which individuals define themselves. The Dr Pepper Brand, in this imaginary, is a natural continuation of primary urges to establish unique identities, a helpful, vital supplement for the crucial task of distinguishing oneself from others.

The commercial’s presumption that people need support in expressing their originality—an authenticity catalyst of the kind a t-shirt might provide—gives it an ironic inflection. Augmented through the retro turn to Sammy Davis, Jr., the irony of expressing one’s authenticity via a branded soft drink invites another identificatory twist: are you like the crowd of those who really think that Dr Pepper t-shirts make you unique, or does your capacity to get the joke, to recognize that originality necessarily exceeds any branded media image, make you different from, even superior to, the rest of the crowd? The fact that some of the slogans are reappropriations of offensive labels—“cougar” and “mamma’s boy,” for instance—opens up this alternative. The wearers of these shirts are unique in their strength, confident enough to assert the labels, to own them. Thus, a further irony: their courage is amplified by the crowd. The energy of the commercial, its feel, comes less from what’s written on the t-shirts (the majority of which can’t be read) than from the sea of red that carries people along. The celebration of difference and creativity comes from the enthusiasm of a crowd where people march shoulder to shoulder, pumping their fists and taking confidence in their collectivity. Even as collectivity as a trope is co-opted into the service of amplifying individual courage, the fact of, the need for, this amplification cuts through the individualist message as it acknowledges the power of the crowd.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign likewise takes individuality as its theme, targeting a demographic the company presents as preoccupied with the assertion of personal uniqueness.

“For teens and Millennials, personalization is not a fad, it’s a way of life,” explains the press release announcing the campaign. “It’s about self-expression, individual storytelling and staying connected with friends.”³ Launched in Australia in 2011 and expanded into some fifty additional countries, the campaign alters the Coke iconography by replacing the Coke logo with personal names. It encourages young consumers to finds cans and bottles with the names of themselves and their friends, photograph them, and share them online.

In the campaign, personal names take the place of the brand. Consumers aren’t called on to show their individuality by wearing the brand. The brand comes to them, taking on their individual identities, letting individuals see themselves in it. The icon becomes abstract enough to carry individual identities while nonetheless transcending them. The appeal of the campaign arises not just from the personal name but from the personal name in the place of the known and popular. The social media dimension of the campaign testifies to the continuation of the place of the brand. The Coke icon is still there, now riding on and circulating through individual uploads of personal self-expression, less viral marketing than free product placement in the intimate moments of everyday life.

When the Left echoes injunctions to individuality, when we emphasize unique perspectives and personal experiences, we function as vehicles for communicative capitalist ideology. “Left” becomes nothing but a name on a bottle, the shape of which is determined for us and which relies on us for its circulation. Making individual difference the basis of our politics, we fail to distinguish between communicative capitalism and emancipatory egalitarian politics. Even worse, we strengthen the ideology that impedes the cultivation of politically powerful collectivities. To call on people to ground their politics in the personal experiences that differentiate them from others is to reinforce capitalist dynamics of individuation. Offering the fantasy of customizable politics, such a call says: look at yourself from the specific position and interests given to you by capitalism and do what you want. In so doing, it pushes away from the collectivity on which left politics depends.

Individualism without Individuals

The injunction to individuality is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget its histories and modulations.⁴ The research of sociologists such as Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennett, Jennifer M. Silva, and Carrie M. Lane treads a path through this history as it attends to the pathologies accompanying capitalist processes of individuation. As I detail below, key sites along this path—rugged individual, corporate gamesman, flexible temp worker, and sole survivor—open up the ways economic turmoil, changes in the structure of authority, and the loss of self-sufficiency give a tenuous quality to personal identity. The shifts from one site to another demonstrate moreover how the competitive pressures of capitalist processes become increasingly displaced onto and concentrated in the individual. The forces enjoining individuation undermine it. The more the individual, that fictitious subject of capitalism, is glorified, the more strained and impossible it becomes.

Lasch’s influential book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations presents an individualism that has self-destructed. Appearing in 1979, the book highlights the rise of a therapeutic sensibility. The economic man of the nineteenth century “has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism.”⁵ For Lasch, the preoccupations with self, authenticity, and personal growth that became prevalent over the course of the 1970s are symptomatic of an individualism collapsing in on itself as commanded individuality struggles to realize the ever-increasing expectations coming to burden it.

Lasch describes his critique of the therapeutic individual as “radical,” even as he shares conservative concerns with the weakening of the family and the rise of dependency. This overlap is worth noting. Not only does it point toward an increasing convergence among critics of the basic institutions of the welfare state, but it also indexes the common object of their concern: the fragile individual. The difference between Lasch’s analysis and the conservative critique of welfare liberalism consists in their targets. Where conservatives attack the bureaucracy of the welfare state, Lasch attacks the bureaucracy of the corporation. He expands this attack into a full assault on the broader impact of corporate culture on American life. Lasch’s innovation stems from his diagnosis of the “me decade’s” preoccupation with psychic health as a symptom of the more fundamental intellectual and political bankruptcy of welfare state capitalism’s liberal paternalism. The end of the individual in narcissistic hedonism and aggression is the outgrowth of capitalism, inclusive of and exacerbated by the liberal welfare state. Capitalism’s own injunctions to individuality overburden and undermine the individual form.

Locating changes in the individual in the context of political and economic change, Lasch contrasts the narcissistic personality of the twentieth century with the rugged individual of the nineteenth century. His vision of the nineteenth-century American psyche (clearly an ideological figure or organizing motif) comes from the settler colonialism of the frontier. The pioneer fights to tame the West, to subdue nature, and eliminate the native threat. This fight requires an attendant internal battle: domination over more immediate appetites and impulses. Lasch writes,

Through compulsive industry and relentless sexual repression, nineteenth-century US Americans achieved a fragile triumph over the id. The violence they turned against the Indians and against nature originated not in unrestrained impulse but in the white Anglo-Saxon superego, which feared the wildness of the West because it objectified the wildness within each individual.⁶

He continues, “Capital accumulation in its own right sublimated appetite and subordinated the pursuit of self-interest to the service of future generations.” The frontier American is egoistic and brutal, this brutality tied to a self-constraint on behalf of civilized community. Violence is channeled, put to internal as well as external use.

Lasch positions the corporation as the twentieth-century parallel to the frontier. In contrast to the fierce and rugged pioneers fighting for survival, seventies Americans are stuck in a boring, ordered, and banal society. Because the struggle for success has replaced the struggle to survive, they have lost the capacity to desire. Nonetheless US Americans in the seventies seethe with an inner rage that bureaucratic society and its injunction to cheerful getting along prevents them from expressing, the violent forces of the id now lacking an outlet.

Lasch uses the “executive” as a figure for twentieth-century narcissism. Unlike the “organization man” associated with mid-century American anxiety about conformism, Lasch’s executive is the bureaucratic “gamesman.” Seeking competitive advantage, the gamesman wants to get ahead of everyone else. He values quickness and mobility. He construes power in terms of momentum. He replaces craftsmanship with socials skills that involve seducing, humiliating, and manipulating others. The gamesman doesn’t interiorize rules as socially valid norms; he experiences both work and personal relations as power struggles. Bureaucratic emphases on rules and cooperation couple with personal exceptionalism—rules don’t apply to me....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Nothing Personal
• 2. Enclosing the Subject
• 3. The People as Subject: Between Crowd and Party
• 4. More Than Many
• 5. The Passional Dynamics of the Communist Party
• Conclusion
• Index