Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2 | CP 1672 - CH-1211 Genève 1 | +41 22 908 57 00 | graduateinstitute.ch MAISON DE LA PAIX
Department of Anthropology and Sociology (ANSO)
Academic year 2018 - 2019
Crowds and Publics
ANSO069 – Spring 2019- 6 ECTS Schedule & Room
Course Description
Ours is "the age of the crowds," or so one would infer from the insistence with which the expression is used in the global media to refer to collective phenomena going on around the world. Whenever it comes up the term "crowds"
usually designates human assemblages horizontally coming together in public space seemingly on their own, not convened by any unified political instance vertically standing above them, so as to put pressure on established state authorities to step down, in order to express discontent with one or another predicament, or, if not, simply with the aim of articulating publicly alternative ways of being and acting in the world. This course aims to explore both genealogically and theoretically the current social, cultural and political significance of this emergent, widespread phenomenon. Genealogically speaking, the significance attributed to crowds has undergone considerable transformation over time, from being perceived as savage, unruly hordes by nineteenth century authors such as Le Bon, Tarde and others, steeped in the evolutionary thinking of the time, to assuming more ambivalent meanings in writers like Elias Canetti, already in the twentieth century, for whom crowds were not only dangerous unruly manifestations but also the sites where the very possibility of democracy is formulated and comes about. One of the aims of the course will be to survey this history, chronologically addressing the work of the main crowd theorists since the late nineteenth-century up to the present.
Theoretically, the course seeks to provide answer to a series of urgent questions. Thus, how is one to interpret the current pervasiveness of crowds, as a wholly emergent phenomena, or, rather, does such a pervasiveness index the return to social experience and awareness of something like a 'being-with' or primary ground of the social that the established hegemonic configurations—
political parties, social movements religious organizations, economic corporations, etc.—for some time managed to relatively suppress but now, in the wake of globalizing pressures and processes, erupt on the surface of sociality with unprecedented magnitude and force? Also, if in their relative informality and horizontal expansiveness crowd phenomena exist in tension with more vertically, hierarchically articulated social formations, can then one say that such a tension is the preeminent milieu where relatively unprecedented forms of articulating social, economic and political realities insinuate themselves according to logics and modalities that cannot be adequately apprehended on the basis of the available theoretical models? If so, then a sustained attention to crowds offers the promise of a renewed understanding of a host of social relations and processes such as abrupt forms of regime change or the generalization of protest movements — think « Occupy » or the so-called Arab Spring — that have proven resilient to established modes of understanding. One of the main presuppositions of this course is that a sustained attention to crowds in their tension with other forms of publics calls for a serious rethinking of canonical Anthropological and Sociological constructs such as ‘society,’ ‘social movements,’ ‘politics’ and the ‘politico-theological'. Besides the relevant theoretical literature the course will also systematically address a host of artistic expressions where the motif of the crowd figures prominently, from nineteenth- century painting and iconography to XXth and XXIst century photography and installation art.
PROFESSOR
Rafael Sánchez
rafael.sanchez@graduateinstitute.ch
Office hours
ASSISTANT
Dalia Zein
dalia.zein@graduateinstitute.ch
