> i'm sure you think you've got a point, i am really sure you do

> never mind

This I suppose is intended to discourage me from boorishly attempting
to drive the point home (hammer -> crooked nail). To be honest, while
I'm equally sure that I thought I had a point, I forget myself why I
felt that way.

[The following should not be taken as an attempt to amplify what I was
saying before, but as a bit of confused and self-indulgent meandering
on a distantly related topic.]

A psychoanalytic commonplace: one can be afraid of being anonymous in
a crowd, or one can be afraid that the crowd means to do harm to some
scapegoat (as crowds quite often do) and furthermore that one might be
a candidate for that role. The second fear might conceivably be a
screen for the first. Better to be afraid of being dramatically,
fatally important than to be afraid of being utterly unimportant.

My mum tried to interest me once in that Auden poem about the crowd
watching the crucifixion. Auden argues that the crowd is necessary to
bear witness to the event, that being part of the crowd is a way for
us to assume collective responsibility even though we are anonymous
and unimportant and unable to be personally responsible. I wasn't able
to take it that way. For me every member of the crowd yelling
"crucify!" was *abandoning* responsibility, surrendering to a vicious
mass impulse that ought to be resisted or, failing that, suppressed.

Dominic

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:38:20 +0100, Lawrence Upton
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> spot on with the 2nd para
>
> first para's silly though I share your mistrust of crowds, dangerous things
>
> no idea what marching is about, ok an odd idea of militarism
>
> i'm sure you think you've got a point, i am really sure you do
>
> never mind
>
> L
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thursday, March 31, 2005 10:31 AM
> Subject: "Expressive anti-politics"
>
> I think this is a very fine article; certainly it illuminates some of
> the sources of my own frustration and ennui with contemporary
> political theatrics:
>
> http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9389
>
> I may be missing a small part of my soul; the truth is that even when
> I was a student I had no time for marches and demonstrations. So not
> only was I not there - by default - in '68, I was not there on any of
> the occasions when I *could* have been there. I remember rolling my
> eyes once at a "March against Militarism". If one did not believe that
> Might made Right, why would one choose to express that non-belief by
> massing together a large number of bodies and throwing their
> collective weight around? The chap on the other side of the trestle
> table thought I had a very queer notion of what marching was all
> about. I don't know, though. I mistrust crowds. People get lost in
> them.
>
> One of the tricks the article misses is that the '68-ers' emphasis on
> authenticity was itself co-opted by the Reaganite right, retooled as
> competitive individualism. The author's line about "the authenticity
> of conscience pitted against the requirements of a pluralistic and
> conflicted society" could be applied equally to the Reaganite creed.
> Every stockbroker a little existential hero. Quite a few of them were
> ex-Hippies into the bargain.
>
> Dominic
> --
> // Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
> // bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
>


--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov