ABSTRACT
The figure of the “everybody” has more recently become a central trope in political campaigning in which particularly right-wing populist politicians make a strategic appeal to this supposedly neglected subject. It is this link that marks the starting point of this chapter, in order to propose a different thinking of the figure variously called the “man in the street”, the “common man” or “everybody”. Taking a closer look at this “common man”, it appears that it is not so much an effective commonality but that there are some specific features that characterise it. While it therefore remains doubtful how a figure of the everybody might work in a non-exclusionary way on a political level, in this chapter I propose a philosophical detour that may provide a clue as to how such a figure can be thought of, imagined and addressed. In the second volume of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari introduce the conceptual figure of the devenir tout le monde, to which I dedicate a large part of this chapter. I then seek to bring this “everybody/everything” closer to some political practices that we have observed in recent years in various protest movements. From there I will highlight some examples from the visual arts. I thereby propose a reading of the “common man/woman*” in the street that counters established images and favours multiple processes of becoming over the reifying identificatory logic of politics, while hinting at the ambivalent and problematic aspects that are inherent in such a trope.
