At a party a few months ago my friend Tom told me about his attempt to bike to Everest Base Camp. After flying into a small Sherpa town the area was hit by an unseasonable and record-breaking blizzard. The two-man party never even got on their bikes. Instead, they joined stranded climbers and locals and spent the time shoveling snow off the roofs in the village to prevent collapse. After that they dug out enough of the runway to allow a helicopter to land.

Tom told the tale with a great deal of sheepish wit and I was thoroughly charmed, not just by his storytelling ability but by the idea of a intrepid band of adventurers from all over the world joining together to get things done in the face of sudden danger. I get a tingle from stories like this, and if pressed I would guess that Americans in general like them too, especially when the stories enlist people of various racial, class, and national backgrounds for a common cause. These stories echo the American melting pot story — people of difference coming together for goodness, adventure, and flashes unexpected ingenuity. United we stand, divided we fall — the plot of so many adventure movies in which a scraggly, plucky band rise against the odds to survive a natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc. This is a spur-of-the-moment collectivity in which we all prove ourselves heroic, brave, and talented, and in which the threats of mother nature or bad guys gives the regular Joe a chance to display his moral fiber.

Later in the same party the host put in the DVD U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle, which opens with the song Elevation. I had never heard that song before, but watching the crowd rise and fall, as if with one body, in response to Bono gave me that tingly feeling again. This time, though, I was reliving the memory of a U2 concert and that kind of spur-of-the-moment collectivity in response to a charismatic leader. It was 1993 and I had spent the summer in a small town in Slovakia, near the Hungarian border. I was lonely and homesick. I hadn’t adjusted well and didn’t get along with the other American teacher there, who left unexpectedly before our term was finished. The two organizers, Slovaks of Hungarian descent, took me into Budapest for the concert but the car broke down on the way and I headed to the concert first, by myself, while they dealt with it. By the time I arrived the concert had just begun and the shock of entering that enormous, screaming, crowd was both physical and psychological. We seemed all strung together, a bundle of strings vibrating in response to what was happening on the stage and with the lights. Sound, color, and emotion were all just different types of energy, transforming from one to another.

I haven’t spent much time in crowds. I’ve never been a church-goer and am not a frequent attendee of pep or protest rallies. There was never (as far as I can recall) any point in that concert when I lost a sense of myself as an individual or forgot that I had to, at some point, figure out how to reunite with my two lost companions. I’m not a person who easily loses a sense of myself as an individual; perhaps I am too self-conscious, too used to calculating the differences between me and the people around me. I hadn’t thought about that concert in a long time but at the party that night, in a room with a group of non-scraggly, mostly unknown people from all over the world, I remembered how pleasurable that sense of collectivity had been and wished to feel it again.

I’m curious about collectivity for a number of reasons. It’s taken me a while to post this because frankly I’m undecided about where I’m going with it. In several places (E Hayot’s recent post, the article he links to, and a recent Bitch PdH post) people have wondered why younger women are reluctant to take the label “feminist.” The comments to the Bitch PhD post seemed to echo the Fortini article: younger women have not felt the sting of discrimination in the world and don’t see that there’s much work to be done. Some mentioned not wanting to be associated with the more radical feminists, at least one mentioned that she felt that she couldn’t be a proper feminist and choose to stay home with her children. (This is what “feminist” has become, I fear: a scraggly group of diverse people who look at each other out of the corner of their eyes and, rather than having choices, have only a continuous sense of guilt.) Still other commentors felt that the younger generation is less interested in identifying with groups. So here are the breaking points: differential experiences leading to different goals, difference within the group which is divisive rather than powerful, and arguments about the effectiveness of group identification.

Another reason for my curiosity is that I’m still mulling over the images in the documentary A State of Mind. If we’re telling stories about collectivity, we can’t leave out the fact of its association with dangerous isms: nationalism, fascism, and communism. And angry mobs. Watching the two young North Korean gymnasts prepare for and perform in the Mass Games worked on me emotionally like the Everest story and the concert; I became invested in these girls, I was moved and so proud of them during the final performance. Whoever picked those girls did a good job — they come across as modest (even shy), honest, and unexpectedly normal, even when one talks about how they hate Americans for causing all the blackouts in the city. Of course, the kind of collectivity we see in this film is coordinated, bred, coerced; it also relies on a charismatic leader abusing his power. But watching this movie was useful to me because it got me away from thinking of the end point of political action. It made me think of the process of transformation. The Mass Games are important not just because of the spectacle itself but because the process of training a participant makes him or her into the ideal communist citizen: responsive, obedient, members of the group.

Which leads me to my last point of curiosity — what drives people to collective identification or participation? Listening to Tom’s tale, I thought there must be an element of pressure or coercion (by disaster or a leader) — enough to shape people’s priorities in similar ways. Watching the concert I thought of unspoken emotional and psychological needs. Watching the Mass Games I thought that there has to be a mode of collectivity too. I think of myself, not a church goer, uncomfortable in crowds, content to offset my carbon online, vote by absentee ballot, and sign petitions by e-mail. Perhaps the younger generation is less excited to identify with collectives because, frankly, collectives aren’t that exciting. Maybe we need more spectacle, more bonfires, more light shows, more Bono.

Here’s a confession: sometimes I hate blogging because it forces me to try to articulate thoughts I haven’t had time to think through. But part of being a part of the plucky, scraggly Printculture collective means that I have to embrace the rawness and write my posts anyway.