ABSTRACT
Jodi Dean explains that the crowd is never certainly the people. The crowd opens the possibility of the people, by way of its energy. The crowd is a political technology which can be deployed to stage the people. Jodi Dean draws on Elias Canetti’s concept of the ‘discharge’ to explain what is essential to crowded staging of the possibility of the people. This is the specificity of the crowd as a political technology. The crowd by itself, unnamed, doesn’t represent an alternative; it cuts out an opening by breaking through the limits bounding permitted experience. The crowd surges forth with a momentum of its own, mis-assembling the space of politics. The boundary – usually a building – remains even when the crowd disperses. With the closed crowd, however, the ‘building is waiting for them; it exists for their sake and, so long as it is there, they will be able to meet in the same manner.
