to change the world.
1 Naomi Klein, “Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now,” The Nation, Oct. 6, 2011.
2 Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Of Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London: Verso, 2012.
3 L. A. Kaufman, “The Theology of Consensus,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, May 26, 2015.
4 Compelling versions of this argument are made by Peter D. Thomas, “The Communist Hypothesis and the Question ofOrganization,” Gavin Walker, “The Body ofPolitics: On the Concept ofthe Party,” and Jason E. Smith, “Contemporary Struggles and the Question ofthe Party: A Reply to Gavin Walker,” Theory & Event 16: 4, Winter 2013.
5 For an account of communist desire in terms of the collective desire for collectivity see my The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2012.
6 Daniel Bensaïd, “Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!” in Lenin Reloaded, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 148–63, 158.
7 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1978, 166.
8 But not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is a vibrant historical literature on pre-industrial and revolutionary crowds, some of the best of which comes from the British Marxist Historians group. See, for example, George Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995; and E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, New York: Norton, 1959. For a recent engagement with the postrevolutionary US American crowd, see Jason Frank, Constituent Moments, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
9 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: Norton, 1932. Original Spanish publication in 1930.
10 As I explain in The Communist Horizon, this is a divisive vision of the people as the rest of us.
11 See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Af ect, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
12 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, 21.
13 Christian Borch provides a history of sociology structured as a history of “crowd semantics,” that is, an analysis of the crowd as a theoretical concept in sociology. See his The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History ofSociology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
14 For a more detailed discussion of communicative capitalism see my Publicity’s Secret, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002; Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009; and Blog Theory, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.
15 In his account ofthe idea and image ofcrowds in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, Stefan Jonsson presents the mass as an effect of representation, more particularly of the problem of representing “socially significant passions” and the structuring of the social field via a distinction between representatives and the represented. See his Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image ofthe Massesfrom Revolution to Fascism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 26.
16 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
17 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Doubleday, 2004.
18 Surowiecki, 29.
19 Eugene W. Hollland, Nomad Citizenship, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
20 Kian Kenyon-Dean uses high school band as a compelling counterexample. Unlike the jazz ensemble unified through the music, high school band is typically divided into at least three groups: band geeks that want to play, the resistant disrupters, and the indifferent. See “Social Force,” Graphite, May 26, 2015.
21 Albert-László Barabási, Linked, Philadelphia, PA: Perseus, 2002.
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