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the cinema to yourself, the road is full of traffic, there is a queue
at the checkout - you go to the latenight garage to buy a pot
noodle, it is three o'clock in the morning but there are five others
already there, they look exactly like you and are buying the same
thing. You think you experience everyone else as the crowd, as
something separate from you but forever surrounding you,
obstructing you, blocking your view and shoving from behind. It is
difficult to think, 'I am an atom'. The decisions you make are
repeated a thousand times in other, remote lives as the sun is
shared in each grain of a broken windscreen, spilled out in the
gutter. Receiver not transmitter: if you become separated from the
crowd, there's a club if you'd like to go, you can meet people just
like you, there are clothes to be worn, equipment to be accrued; it
is just like Bruce Lee, just where you are thwarted there you shall
flower. One of the characteristics of expressivity, as a social
quality as well as a brand of politics, is the sensed dispersal of
ordinary social commonality as it is determined objectively by
economic forces. Other, more immediate more personal motors
are presumed to be the cause of behavioral reality (psychology).
When ordinary reality is dispersed in consciousness it is replaced
by a subsequent, compensatory, centripetal drive revolving on a
hub of arbitrary but strict 'cultures'. Strangers come together.

Expressivity has it social and economic determinates, what was
previously permitted like a bit of wasteground in the City, as
irrelevant and vulgar entertainment of the masses, 'working class
culture' if you insist (if that is not a self-contradiction) was
abolished after 1950 and replaced with mass popular culture
developed according to the commodity form. Which means only
that in every city of the world you will find a McDonalds and in
every city you will find an anti-capitalist protester - the object
shaped by the commodity form is that which recurs. The elective
communities that arrange themselves about the object of their
enthusiasm alter, for themselves, the reality of their condition in
two ways: firstly, they do not 'appreciate' their chosen object as it
exists objectively, that is, their enthusiasm contains no trace of its
derivation - one does not gush for an object as a commodity but
carefully screen that element out, even though it is the commodity
element that makes the object possible; secondly, fragmented,
enthusiast communities arranged about mystified objects are
organized according to commodity distribution - what is
unacknowledged is that which finally determines. What is present