Fashions come and go, but what about academic or intellectual fashions? Are they like any other, with the same pleasures and limitations? Or should ideas be protected from the vagaries and currencies of what is current? Googling the phrase “academic fashion” produces...
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 magnet. But the crowd in strike has a number of very different...
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 Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso...
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...
The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy sovereignty; nor a ‘means’ for others to become sovereign. The crowd is remarkable because of its prevalence and excision. It is often there in those...
Knowledge is always situated. As a young scholar from China working on western theories, I always felt frustrated with the eurocentrism embedded within them. The frustration comes first because they are not addressing the problems lingering in my mind; and second at...
