The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd?

Abstract

Who’s Afraid of the Crowd? Today we speak of multitudes rather than crowds. Or, to be more precise, if we want to suggest that the immanent potentials of a collective are politically progressive we call this collective a multitude, whereas if we want to cast it as regressive we call it a crowd. Crowds, supposedly, belong to the past of the (neo)liberal democracies of the global North. By the same token, they also mark the present of nonor insufficiently liberal polities in the global South. To simplify somewhat, crowds are the dark matter that pull on the liberal subject from its past, whereas multitudes occupy the emergent horizon of a postliberal politics. It is as if, even now, speaking of crowds means speaking of something crude and stupid. So we use qualifiers. In our internet age we hear a lot about the network society with its smart mobs and virtual crowds.1 Decentralized assemblages, the networks of the so-called knowledge society, involve nimble, selforganizing crowds. But the hotheaded savagery of the old, regressive crowd is never far behind, particularly when race or class comes into play. Consider how commentary on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign bifurcated. Never before, we were told, had the internet so cleverly been used to coordinate a virtual social movement around a political candidate. At the same time, conservative pundits wrinkled their noses at the whiff of the “Third World” that hovered around this “politics of crowds.”2