"Crowds and Publics”

Since 2011, the most important social actor worldwide has been the crowd. The most pressing political challenge has been the struggle over, around, and through the crowd: of what politics is the crowd the subject? Drawing from early crowd theory and its inversion in contemporary business porn as the “wisdom of crowds,” this talk considers the affective and disruptive dimension of crowds. Crowds force a relation to politics different from that theorized around ideas of publicity and publics, a relation that draws out the necessity of political division.