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25 civil crowd
A civil democracy is realized through actions taken by its citizenry. The use of the street for demonstrations of civic belonging and collective celebration are not merely windowdressing for the mass media. Simply consuming the spectacles of the state is not nearly sufficient to reproduce the ground for a democratic nation, and this ground—spatially and discursively—must be reproduced regularly. In particular, there must be room for the collective voice of crowds.
Places and crowds fill the histories1 of democratic revolutions. Civic festivals are the reenactments of these founding moments, and civil societies are their offspring. Because there were crowds that used violence to protest social and economic circumstances, crowd control became another feature of the modern street. And again, this constraint was said to be aimed at others, at anarchists and gangs, but its effect was to preempt the crowd event as a regular forum for civic participation. By and large we can today track the disappearance of crowds on the streets of our cities. But then what are the effects of this absence on democracy and on the public sphere?
playing in public
I submit that violence or its threat is not a feature of the agency of what I call a “civil crowd.” The notion that a civil crowd has agency, that its formation can open up space where a difference is produced, has been almost entirely subsumed by the metaphor of the crowd-as-mob, and its agency reduced to anarchy. Bill Buford describes in fine detail the riots of British soccer fans, who created their own game, one that involved glass breaking, car turning, head busting, and police confrontation. There is, however, no civic intention in this, nothing inherent in the violence that makes the resulting rampage somehow work toward any external goal. Rabblerousing does carry its own history, but this history is not sufficient to explain the potential for civic action by a crowd. As Thompson (1993, 65-66) notes, “...the “to-fro lackeying” of the crowd itself has a history of great antiquity: the “primitive rebels” of one age might be seen, from an earlier age, to be the decadent inheritors of yet more primitive ancestors.
Too much historical hindsight distracts us from seeing the crowd as it was, sui generis, with its own objectives, operating within the complex and delicate polarity of forces of its own context.” In fact, the atavistic “mob effect” that Gustave Le Bon (1960 [1895]) discursified 101 years ago, is only parasitic on this agency.
What the civil crowd represents at its potential limit is a display of individual expression that is unconstrained, and therefore uncontrolled, and thus, in a certain fashion, genuine. There is a moment when this crowd follows no leader, and, should it speak in a single voice, an actual consensus appears that is neither prefigured, nor subservient to an external interest. But consensus is not the goal of such a crowd. For it is a crowd of strangers, in that peculiar sense where all citizens must be strangers in public to join in the public sphere. And where this crowd of strangers finds consensual agreement may be a point less valuable than where the crowd voices a plurality of desires.
Whatever the content, the source of the crowd's inherent democracy is the performance in public of individual expression. The latter, in turn, legitimates the actions of a civil crowd in the public sphere (cf. McClelland 1989, and Canetti 1962). More than public opinion polls, which respond to questions posed by pollsters, and more than voting, which offers only a choice between preselected alternatives, the civil crowd opens up to dialogical and multivocal interaction. Here is where the melodies of democracy become polyphonic.
What I wish to discuss is how, and, more specifically, where civil crowds take place. For a civil crowd is a spatial performance that is not possible apart from public places that situate its practice. While the media now broadcasts images of this place to other places, such a crowd cannot be generated by the media itself. Most crowds are not civil crowds, although this notion is neither exclusive nor singular in its definition. The ability of a civil crowd to reach a plateau of genuine expression depends upon a complex series of moments; it is a game that must be played with some skill. And so this process is liable to various types of failure. For example, the internal dynamics of the process will collapse into an orchestrated simulation of a civil crowd, if the participants allow their expressions to be scripted. This is a common feature of political demonstrations where leaders with bullhorns prompt a chant from the crowd. Conversely, attempts at orchestration may also fail. Nicolae Caucesceu's final orchestrated demonstration is an example of a civil crowd developing out from a scripted event. The force of this chorus of genuine expression sent him scampering for his helicopter.
And, though a civil crowd can come about without planning2, I want to look at how one of these can be planned. How does one organize an event that cannot be led, in which individuals feel free to display a genuine expression of their desires? The claim that an expression is genuine is what needs to be examined here. Quite obviously, “genuine” here is a scalar notion. Its more-or-less quality is tied to the location of the expression in question. Which is to say that the more an expression is produced by the individual qua individual, the more this can be called genuine to the individual. The civil crowd is a aggregate of individual voices.
There is a whole literature on hegemony that describes how the expressions of individuals in modernity are externally managed, other comments on modernity detail the deskilling of individuals in various modes of experience and knowledge, and so we have to be careful in assigning the site of production to an individual, and we must ask what skills are required to author a “genuine” expression. These twin conditions of late modernity—the surrender of individual authority, and the bodily deskilling in expressive practices—are structural impediments to the civil crowd as a site of democracy. It may be that we are today “crowd-impaired” to an extent that it is difficult even to imagine the potential agency of a civil crowd. But it is not impossible.
getting private in public
I have constructed a theoretical scaffold for the notion of the civil crowd in public space. This theory is based upon the work of several social theorists, with some major enhancements, mostly accomplished by assembling scattered parts. There are times, I argue, when “private”3 spaces open up within a public space. Festivals are typically times when this transformation can, an indeed, must take place. Step outside on a certain evening in February in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and normalcy is conspicuously absent, and in its place are usually private expressions of joy and sexuality. But Mardi Gras, like many festivals, is a civil crowd that refuses to take itself seriously, and so its range of expression is quite limited.
This takes me to my final point. A civil crowd is a serious private party on a public street. It is private because it opens up to a form of intimacy that denies the visual monitoring of the street. Individuals in the crowd dis-attend to the “publicness” of the street, and actively transform the space into an ad-hoc private realm.
Now, the crowd is a “party” because it uses embodied skills to carry the individual to a condition where emotional self-monitoring is no longer possible. This decontrol of emotions is what actually warrants the genuineness of the expressive display, and the (above) disattention to visual monitoring of expression is what promotes the sharing4 of this content. The civil crowd is a festival rehearsing its own performance—but where the rehearsal is the performance.
Finally, the crowd is serious in that its expressions are representational of the participants' desires and perspectives. A type of “sur-rationality” emerges that is both hyper-reflexive and morally potent. A localized conviction congeals on the spot, binding words to emotions to bodies and to the crowd as a group. Such an event probably comes as close as one gets to Habermas's ideal speech situation. The work of the civil crowd can now begin.
Giddens (1994: 127) talks of “active trust” as a formative feature of a “dialogic democracy.”5 The crowd creates active trust between individual participants, beginning a public conversation that has long-term effects. To take the street away from the cops and the shops and the government for an hour or two decentres, if only momentarily, positions of influence, and brings new voices into the center stage.
The possession of the public square by a crowd establishes a claim to ownership, and to belonging in public. The voices emerging from (or spoken to) the crowd enter into a public-sphere arena of discussion and dissent. The crowd demands to be heard, and any democratic state that does not listen does not deserve the title.
Here I am also promoting the idea that a festival—should the process of organization and performance of this be done with attention to the limits of scripting and an open invitation to its membership—is a model example of a civil crowd.
1From Boston to Philadelphia, to Paris and London, to Moscow and Warsaw and Tienanmen in Beijing: the places where the public acquires its legitimate claim to its self rule are places defined by crowds and by protests and festivals. Note here the absence of such events in Japan.
2Tienanmen is an example of a civil crowd fashioning a collective agency out of a wellspring of genuine expression. Its failure, was, in large part, due to the failure of bringing this expression into a realm of planning and into a coherent voice.
3A private space “in public” is no longer “private”, but then neither is the public space during this event “public.” These terms show their limits under these conditions. It is this transformation that opens up a public space to a civil crowd.
4The word “share” here is important, as the means to arrive at this condition is mutually created. The participants rely upon each other's willingness to proceed to a plateau of collective intimacy. Intimacy is always shared (otherwise it is just another confessional episode of modernity), and in this sharing an active trust is formed. Like combat, or brain surgery, or baseball, the civil crowd makes a team out of individual participants, and it manufactures memories that persist. And, like, baseball or brain surgery, practice hopefully does make perfect.
5During the course of the festival any number of expressions are possible, as these are produced dialogically and without scripting. Individual comments reverberate and are inverted, parodied, and reflect the plurality of individuals within the event. Bodies and words play an ensemble of discursive sonatas, the content of which is never predictable. But the content is also not what is foremost in the event. Here is where silence also speaks, as it is not, for a moment, the product of terror. The ability of a state to allow the festival in its streets brings with it a measure of legitimacy, as the crowd's voices and demeanor will comment on the state. The availability of civil protest also legitimates the state, as this marks its openings to democratic reappraisal.
