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  • Crowds and Power
  • Jodi Dean (bio)
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly By Judith Butler Harvard University Press 2015

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, crowds have disrupted the settings given by capital and the state. Breaking with the suffocating reflexivity of contribution and critique in the mediated networks of communicative capitalism, insistent crowds impress themselves where they don't belong. Their very presence challenges the privatization of ostensibly public places from São Paulo, to Istanbul, to New York. Intense and temporary aggregations in multiple locations now appear as one struggle. We see Montreal connected to Athens connected to Cairo connected to Madrid connected to Oakland. Instead of the incommunicable strikes of a multitude of singularities, crowds and riots in place after place communicate the collective movement of the people, pushing questions of similarity, meaning, and alliance: Of what politics will the crowd have been the subject?

Some contemporary crowd observers claim the crowd for democracy. They see in the amassing of thousands a democratic insistence, a demand to be heard and included. Others recognize that the crowd exceeds democracy. Communicative capitalism reconfigures the relation between crowds, democracy, capitalism, and class. "We are the 99%" is a slogan of class war. On the one hand, the democratic reading of the crowd blocks this reconfiguration from view. It harnesses the crowd into the service of the very setting that the crowd disrupts. On the other hand, the democratic reading reveals a struggle over the subject of politics: the contest over whether a crowd is the people or the mob.1

The association of crowds and democracy has a long legacy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the crowd appeared as the [End Page 335] quintessential political expression of the people. Commentators wanting to keep the people in their place depicted crowds as brutal, primitive, and criminal mobs. Commentators seeking to overthrow the elites championed the crowd's political vitality: workers, peasants, and commoners of every sort were asserting their sovereignty. Marx famously describes the crowds of the Paris Commune as the people "storming heaven." For nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers, crowds and popular democracy are intertwined. The issue is whether the sovereignty of the people can be anything other than mob rule.

The democratic reading of the crowd turns on the alternative: the mob or the people. Even as the crowd forces the possibility of the intrusion of the people into politics, whether the people is the subject of a crowd event is up for grabs. The crowd opens up a site of struggle over its subject. A crowd might have been a mob, not an event at all. It might have been a predictable, legitimate gathering, again, not an event but an affirmation of its setting. And it might have the people rising up to emancipate themselves. Which a crowd event is, or, better, which it will have been, is an effect of the political process the crowd event activates. The crowd does not have a politics. It is the opportunity for politics. The determination whether a crowd was a mob or the people results from political struggle.

The most influential early crowd theorist was Gustave Le Bon. His widely reprinted and translated book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, laid the groundwork for twentieth-century theorization of crowds. Le Bon presents the crowd as a distinct form of collectivity. The crowd is a temporary collective being. It holds itself together affectively via imitation, contagion, suggestion, and a sense of its own invincibility. Because the crowd is a collective being, it cannot be reduced to individuated bodies. On the contrary, the primary characteristic of a crowd is its operation as a force of its own, like an organism. The crowd is more than an aggregate of individuals. It is individuals changed through the torsion of their aggregation, the force aggregation exerts back on them to do together what is impossible alone.

Democratic governments justify themselves as rule by the people. When crowds gather in opposition, they expose the limits of this justification. The will of the majority expressed in elections stops appearing as the will of the people. That not all of the...

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