Concluding this first tranche of essays on the crowd, Illan looks at the ‘catastrophe’ and infinity of the general strike.We know from Burke that it is the noise of the crowd or throng which leads to the experience of the sublime. The cacophony of the many, gathered in their discharged state, draws us like a…
Our series on crowds continues, in connection with the Crowded Sovereignty Project, with a reflection on Le Bon’s racialisation of the crowd.Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian…
Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power provides a useful starting point for this project. In it, he identifies a wide number of different crowds. They are determined by the temporality of their aims, the space in which they manifest themselves, the orientation of their activity, the manner in which their togetherness is conceived. In fact, the axes of…
We are delighted to be launching the new website Crowded Sovereignty, and over the next few days we will be publishing the first three installments of this investigation of crowds, sovereignty, law and disorder.The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy…