In short: crowds function on emotion, not thought, so; are capable of being easily directed (or manipulated), but not of providing direction.

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The shop.,.. — Galuchat

A crowd... — Galuchat

Re-reading the thread, I feel I replied to something nobody said. Well, that's embarrassing.

I have to start with something petty

So yeah, there's alot motivating and informing this particular crossing of concepts, and if all you get out of it is that 'being together changes people', well, I think you're being unfair. — StreetlightX

In fairness I didn't get {'when people are together in crowds, the fact of being together, changes them. Being together as a crowd lets them do things they couldn't do alone?'} out of your subsequent post, but out of the Jodi Dean quote and I think that gloss accurately captured what she said.

My interest is 'two-way': what can thinking crowds in terms of subjectivity tell us about subjectivity itself? And what can it tell us about crowds? (put like an essay question: 'what can thinking about crowds and subjectivity together tell us about both?'). In terms of the latter question (your question): thinking about crowds as subjects allows us - me - to bring to bear upon crowds all the philosophical resources that have been developed for subjectivity. Like what? 'Historicity' for one: like, it's widely acknowledged today that subjects are historical, 'created' under these or those conditions: feudal subjects, neoliberal subjects, gendered subjects, medical subjects, each of these having a history shaped by institutions, cultures, events, etc.

So can we speak of crowds having histories in this way? Have there been transformations in how crowds have related to the world around them? Can we think of how the agency of the crowds has been shaped and changed under different conditions? I think the answer is yes, especially when one looks to things like techniques of crowd management, the changes in urban space, the mediums by which crowds are brought together, etc etc. Lots to be said here. But what else? What other resources from 'subjectivity' can we bring to bear? — StreetlightX

I agree with all this, in theory. And certainly, the concept should be enriched by what it's being applied to, and not just the other way round. But I'm really looking for an example of a particular insight provided by looking at crowds through the lens of 'subjectivity' . To say that crowds are created under certain conditions, and that there have been transformations in how they've related to the world, is simply to say that crowds are a phenomenon susceptible to historical analysis.

And then there's the flip side - what can crowds teach us about subjectivity? Given that subjectivity has almost always been thought of in relation to the individual, crowd subjectivity really makes the concept super interesting to me. Dean, again, speaks about how subjectivity has continually been 'enclosed', both historically and philosophically, much in the same way in which the commons have been enclosed, linking the enclosure of the commons with the enclosure of the subject (in the individual, rather than the crowd), and in parallel, thinking about crowds in terms of the commons.

And this is important to me because I think this has a particularly important political valence: if subjectivity is a way of thinking about agency, and we can speak of a crowd subjectivity, then we can speak of the particular agency of the crowd. This is important to me because it's so hard today to think about agency in any other terms that that of the individual - there's been an 'enclosure' of agency in the individual just like there's been an enclosure of subjectivity in the individual too. To be blunt about it: how can we think through the freedom afforded to us by the crowd, as distinct from the only freedom anyone ever seems to talk about, the freedom of the individual? And in current conditions when shitty American politics saturates us and the freedom of the individual has basically colonized any talk of freedom, I find thinking of crowd subjectivity both refreshing and almost liberatory (this is the 'celebratory' note you detected previously). — StreetlightX

This makes sense a lot of sense to me and feels like it's setting the right stage for an insight derived from the fusion of subjectivity and crowds. But I'm trying to see around the corner, where that insight isn't just that society has become more atomized, that Thatcher said there's no such thing as society, and that crowds offer the possibility of de-atomization, allowing us to make collective demands or direct collective action in a way that's different than individual demands or individual action. That there are different possibilities and constraints for a crowd, as opposed to an individual. Not that that's a small thing - it's huge - but it's just something we already know.

can we speak of crowds having histories in this way? Have there been transformations in how crowds have related to the world around them? Can we think of how the agency of the crowds has been shaped and changed under different conditions? I think the answer is yes, especially when one looks to things like techniques of crowd management — StreetlightX

if we retake the historical perspective, we should conclude, that in the West, spontaneous crowd eruptions, acquiring the political will and threatening the existing regime, have become exclusively
rare events. And, to amplify this argument, it is necessary to exclude the protest movements in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Probably, the last time when the left parties got a chance to grub a power, was in France in May of 1968.
Dean mentioned that the crowd could be created without the physical proximity of people.
(I downloaded a pdf file of her book)
Gerald Raunig has also developed a similar idea in “A thousand machines.” Starting from the 20th century, radio, cinema, TV, and further recent various Internet platforms have begun to function in a crowd’s manner. I mean, that masses experience the effects of proximity without being physically gathered together. The virtual groups, created by the newest means of mass media, communication, and entertainment, to a considerable extent, can reproduce the crowd’ effects, described by Canetti. Further, they also can simulate and imitate the whole spectrum of the political or social life of society; they have a broader audience and a much more powerful means of reproduction. They can be scheduled in advance, easily manipulated, and they are connected to the global network of capitalistic monetary flows. Even the most “innocent” entertainment program functions as an reproductive generator of subjectivities, simulating an active social group.

Dean, again, speaks about how subjectivity has continually been 'enclosed', both historically and philosophically, much in the same way in which the commons have been enclosed, linking the enclosure of the commons with the enclosure of the subject (in the individual, rather than the crowd), and in parallel, thinking about crowds in terms of the commons. — StreetlightX

So far, it is not clear how the newest forms of social organization and production of subjectivities are related to the development of unpredictable, spontaneous, crowd-like events, taken by Dean as a leading condition of the revolutionary situation. Probably, it would be reasonable to assume that the latest forms of social interaction do restrict, confine, and even displace Le Bon and Canneti’s crowds. One of the ways to reflect on this situation was the creating
of the concept of the precarious. (Butler, Raunig, Lorey, maybe some others).
Raunig writes: “The precarious indicates dispersion, fragility, and multitude. The precariat does not represent a unified, homogeneous or even ontological formation, but instead distributed and dispersed among many spots. Yet, instead of the clearly negative connotation of dispersion as obstructing all social intercourse, there are the potentiality of new forms of communication and generation of concatenations of singularities”. The precariat, the 21st century analog of the proletariat, is radically opposed to Canneti’s crowd. Without a doubt, the new concept can be justified with the help of sociological or economic perspectives. Yet, the position of the leading political collective subjectivity has remained vacant.

It's not the new kinds of subjectivities that need to be 'taken into account' per se - at this point I take it for granted that different kinds of subjectivities are produced in varying circumstances - so much as how they are produced. If fact, one wants to say that the question is not even so much to do with the production of certain subjectivities, but in looking to think about 'counter-productions' of subjectivity, 'our' productions against 'their' productions. — StreetlightX

When one is successful in dismantling, disassembling a complex of
prevailing subjectivities, one functions not just as a political philosopher or a radical thinker. One is already engaged in counter-production.
Due to their totalizing, penetrating effects, “the neoliberal subjectivities,” produced
by the capitalist neoliberal network, are acting on everybody.
The task is simultaneously theoretical, existential and aesthetic – one inevitably encounters the net of mighty, unrecognizable forces, so that “analysis is no longer the transferential interpretation of symptoms as a function of a preexisting, latent content, but the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence.”
Cuattari, “Chaosmosis”.

As Deleuze wrote, the collective becomes "samples, data, or markets". What's missing in this latter approach to collectivity is solidarity, an acting together and with one another. — StreetlightX

the dominant mode of subjectivity production today, is atomistic and - in D&G's terms which you are familiar with - 'dividual'. — StreetlightX

I think that this is a misinterpretation of how Deleuze and Guattari conceived
collectivity, solidarity, and a subject-to-come. All in all, Jodi Dean has ultimately
rejected their approach (without mentioning their names) as prioritizing the vanguard and the rupture. Yet, in spite of providing the comprehensive historical analyses of the Paris Commune, is her theory workable?

What's missing in this latter approach to collectivity is solidarity, an acting together and with one another. Thinking in terms of masses you ironically end-up getting individualized solutions — StreetlightX

Solidarity, the ability of working together, should be built, constructed by the real counter-production
of the militant subjectivities (and it is what D&G left for us); it cannot be achieved through the nostalgic declarations and the reminiscent slogans.

I wonder if you have a link to the pdf of Dean's book. Thank you.

https://wofdeho.firebaseapp.com/20/Crowds-and-Party.pdf

For the love of god and baby jesus and all who sail in him, use a term NOT already in use. It’s a headache reading around the definition of ‘subjectivity’ and taking on your personal use of the term - especially when you splash it across the post several times.

Re-reading the thread, I feel I replied to something nobody said. Well, that's embarrassing. — Dawnstorm

I thought your post was really good. You approached 'subjectivity' as something like, I think, a role in a game. It was a structural approach. And I think it's what we're all talking about, but more fleshed-out. You drove the point home in a concrete, textured way. I got what you were saying. I kind of intentionally ignored your post because it worked against the grain of the narrative I was advancing. Which I'm still advancing, to be fair.

I'm being opportunistic, as always. I think your approach was founded, was textured, was concrete. I am skeptical that the use of 'subjectivity' by others is anything like that.

Very nice. Thank you. Without derailing the thread, is there a special method to find or search for pdfs of philosophical works?

Thanks. I never really know how well I make my points, so having feedback helps.

The problem with my post was that it... wasn't sensitive to the flow of the conversation and rewinded the entire thing to a much earlier stage. I didn't notice I was doing that when I was typing. I think the key problem I was having, what caused my confusion, is that I took "crowd subjectivity" instinctively as a synonym for "collective subjectivity", when it's not. In my post, a vending machine could serve as a stand-in for a collective. But a vending machine is obviously not a crowd. Only when I read Galuchat's post did I realise that.

I guess my question would be, then, what's a crowd to begin with (people using the subway vs. people attending a rock concert - I feel there's a difference in output here), and how does it relate to "collective subjectivity"? The prototype? An example?

Mill was disparaging of the crowd - he was no friend of social thought and he was as much as intellectual progenitor to the atomization and destitution of society as any other liberal thinker. — StreetlightX

True, I think. He wasn't a fan of conformity -- he thought society should be one big lab for experimentation, if I remember correctly.

Huxley is careful to distinguish between the group and the crowd:
"Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own, and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice."

I'm a strong believer in the role of collective consciousness.