The Crowd
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@concrete_abstract
Released: 2026
Format: Tshirt
Price: 20e
1. The Act
In the beginning is the act. The miraculous discharge of human potentiality: the sublime, boundlessness, of the living deed and spoken word that ruptures whatever confines, ascribes, establishes.
Unlike fabrication, wherein the outcome can be located and judged through an image or model perceived beforehand, the value of actions appear only at their end, frequently only when all the participants are dead. As a means without ends, the act is beholden to no order, because activity serves no outcome extrinsic to itself, for the aim of action is sharing and sharing is the common aim of living well.
Every order, every organized aspiration for political dominion, has come to know that even one minor deed or spoken word bears the seeds of this boundlessness.
2. The Story
And than came the story, the first technology of governance. The story assigns authorship, it makes a subject appear behind every act. Through the story the ceaseless passing of time is given form. The story inscribes acts into a chronology, retroactively showing and revealing their intentions, authors, subjects and visions. It is through the storytellers mythological binding of past deeds to a narrative form that a constancy is fabricated that permits the establishment of a unified political subject. A subject, like all subjects, whose ability to appear is separated from their ability to exist.
The Political, as Arendt concluded, is hence the organization of actings remembrance. The management of the gap inherent in the subject between acting and appearing.
3. Mimesis
If the story is a technology for organizing the acts remembrance, storytelling requires a place for its recounting before an audience. What we may in the broadest sense call the “theater” is hence the place for actings appearance. And what the theater finally provides as the place of the political, is a technology for memesis. A mechanism for the imitation, for the repetition, of acts for those that were not there. The theater is the infrastructure of reappearance. The memetic circulation of acts, the means to assign value to them and propagate that value as a collective good by the public that mimetically imitates them.
The political stage provides a memetic estimate for what makes it worthwhile for people to live together; encouraging the repetition of the virtues it can only retroactively prescribe.
The space of politics, as a space for mimesis is hence pre and post political. It offers a space and form for the multiplication of actions’ contents. Not Athens but the Athenians were the Polis—as they liked to declare. The aim of the polis, of a space for politics, is merely to set the condition in which extraordinary acts become the ordinary occurrences of everyday life.
Authoritarianism always begins as a monopoly over the space of appearance and finally, ultimately, the complete severance of the right to appear from the right to exist. A form of mimesis without acts. The appearance of pure appearance. The desertification of the social realm.
4. Crowds
Crowds enter the stage only after the appearance of the subject in the space of the political.
The miraculous emergence of the crowd marks the scene of humanities raw reappropriation of their boundless power of acting. The crowd, like the act, is a force of unmaking.
And while the crowd poses a problem for social orders throughout time, it becomes a particularly threatening force during the feudal transition to capitalism. Made up of displaced peasants, fugitive serfs and former slaves; of witches, heretics and vagabonds; Feudal crowd formations were the nemesis of a system of rule that aspired to put all parts in their proper place; to measure and ascribe value to all things.
Crowd formations were both propelled by capitalist development – enclosures, displacements, urbanization, class formation and war; all those factors and forces that uproot and fragment the social body – while at the same time posing a critical threat to capital in their resistance to subjectification as labor-power, THE People, as citizens. From Hegel’s banishment of the rable from the rational state, to Le Bon and then Freud’s terror in witnessing the crowds power to erase the borders of the individual psyche; the crowd could be surmised as Modernity’s exemplary anti- subject.
Forever shifting in title from populus, plebs, vulgus, turba, or multitudo the crowd remains an insurmountable principle of negativity that condemns even the most stable and well ordered systems of governance to eventual ruin... the crowd is an expression of the people as an inconsistent multiplicity of needs, desires, and fancies; a collectivity whose form and logic obeys only the immanent laws of its own powers and capacities. The crowd, exceeding and belittling the law of scarcity, which is to say the law of the few over the many; is the abyss upon which all measure is established.
5. Memes with Force
Beginning in the spring of 1917, riding the wave of emotional euphoria evoked by the February Revolution, crowds began to propagandize the image of a “revolution-Easter” that would resurrect the people. Galvanized by the memetic circulation of this self-made holiday, state alcohol warehouses were ritualistically looted across the country. In September, it gripped Astrakhan D, Tashkent, Orel, Gomel’, Tambov, and Ufa; in October—Kharkiv, Starodub, Ternopil, and a series of other cities in the southwest of the former Russian Empire. In November, it overwhelmed Petrograd, and after the first rumors about the fall of the Provisional Government—the majority of provincial and district centers of provincial Russia.
The looting of alcohol reserves, in combining a display of physicality and sociality, elements of ritual and revolt, proved to be a radically contagious mimetic force that gave everyone the opportunity to storm their own white palace.
Despite capitals systematic effort to repress the crowd and eliminate its sources, crowd formations and their theological ingressions persist today as that irresolvable negativity of the law of bodies I spoke of earlier—a negativity every order of scarcity is necessarily established upon.
Today’s crowds variously practice the “schwarmers” storming of heaven by manifesting the “city of data’s” limitless abundance of communicative, symbolic, and subjective capacities in the “city of man”.
Defying capture by the corporate digital domain which polices and profits through the incescenat ascription of “data-to-subjects”; the crowd of today practices an insurgent virality. Breaking the ascriptive power of capital’s “data-as-subjects” logic, the digital sphere is recircuited into the liberated domain of “data-as-crowd”. In data-as-crowd the circuit governing the relation between data and reality is no longer defined by subjects, but through the anonymous, mutating, and deterritorialiing force of the meme.
Contrasting this phenomenon of memes with force to the “social movement paradigm” that “refers to a process by which groups get organized around their experience as constituencies of institutionally recognized social categories, Adrian and Wohlleben point to the Yellow Vests in France to speak to the potential of what they call “memetic composition”. As they state: “donning a safety vest carries with it no unifying ideology, principle, or demand, nor any particular subject- position or identity. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement.
Memetic composition by contrast to the social movement paradigms “constituent composition” is argued to hold “the power to suspend the suspensions that define our metropolitan social separation. Differences of experience or ideology are neither effaced nor resolved, but their resolution no longer forms a precondition for engagement with others. The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, like a Tarot deck in which the audience fills in the personal content.”
Another instance of the crowds insurgent memetic force can be found in T’s essay on the Jin Jiad azadi movement in Iran. In the essay Figuring a Women’s Revolution. T reflects on the liberating potentiality of bodies interacting with their mediatized images. Living in a smaller city, the first signs of the movement appeared to T through social networks where images were circulated of crowds rupturing every prescription placed upon the body by the regime. As T accounts:
The first moments of being “there,” in the street, surrounded by protestors, were extremely strange. Only a day earlier, I had watched these protestors from behind a cellphone screen, marveling at their courage, choking up, and weeping at their actions. I looked around me and tried to synchronize the images of the street with the reality of the street. What I saw firsthand was very similar to what I had previously viewed on screen, but there was a gap between the spectator-I and the I-in-the-street that took a few short moments to recognize. The space between me and the images I had desired had grown very small. Imyself was those images. I would suddenly see myself in a circle burning headscarves, as though we had always been burning scarves. I would suddenly become conscious of myself and would realize that I was being beaten just a few moments earlier.
For T the circulation of images didn’t only act as a documentative force for the regimes loss of control over subjects, but actively recircuited the relation between images-and-subjects. The image became a force of disruption of the order of appearence; propeling bodies into action without their subjects. As T continues:
Images are published and distributed, and they arouse the imagination of bodies. People thereafter go to the street not with the bodies that they are, but with the bodies that they can and want to be. With their own imagination. Their revolutionary act is to incarnate this imagination. In truth, in this tying-together of image and street, representation and reality mutually orient one another. Dream/representation/incarnation can impose itself on reality. Becoming that image, and at the same time, arousing the desire of other bodies to become. The chain of images: “the short-circuiting of the street with virtual space.”
More than either a regression to primitive communal nature or the individuals pathological capitulation to a cult personality, what if we looked to crowds as forces capable of birthing new forms and spaces for a politics of acts?
If the theater offers a space for the organized appearance of boundless acts; the crowd, insofar as it could be seen as a “meme with force” is a breaking of the theaters 4th wall, the viral discharge of mimetic circuity into the unsanctioned, unplanned, theaters of life.
In this sense, crowds don’t only disrupt the order of appearance but offer an all together different groundwork for the political. This space may be understood through the concept of compereance (co-apperance). Unlike the order of apperance, which is always seperate from acts, comperance unfolds through a space in which acts and stories ceaselessly dislocate one another through contagious interplay, mutation, diffusion. Here we encounter a political force that by making what was once enclosed and separated shared, declares that the symbolic other is no longer the limits of the self, but an ecstatic encounter that mutually incompletes the we. Through the de-individuated sharing of acts and their appearances, the crowd affirms that the being in me is outside myself and inside myself.
Released: 2026
Format: Tshirt
Price: 20e
1. The Act
In the beginning is the act. The miraculous discharge of human potentiality: the sublime, boundlessness, of the living deed and spoken word that ruptures whatever confines, ascribes, establishes.
Unlike fabrication, wherein the outcome can be located and judged through an image or model perceived beforehand, the value of actions appear only at their end, frequently only when all the participants are dead. As a means without ends, the act is beholden to no order, because activity serves no outcome extrinsic to itself, for the aim of action is sharing and sharing is the common aim of living well.
Every order, every organized aspiration for political dominion, has come to know that even one minor deed or spoken word bears the seeds of this boundlessness.
2. The Story
And than came the story, the first technology of governance. The story assigns authorship, it makes a subject appear behind every act. Through the story the ceaseless passing of time is given form. The story inscribes acts into a chronology, retroactively showing and revealing their intentions, authors, subjects and visions. It is through the storytellers mythological binding of past deeds to a narrative form that a constancy is fabricated that permits the establishment of a unified political subject. A subject, like all subjects, whose ability to appear is separated from their ability to exist.
The Political, as Arendt concluded, is hence the organization of actings remembrance. The management of the gap inherent in the subject between acting and appearing.
3. Mimesis
If the story is a technology for organizing the acts remembrance, storytelling requires a place for its recounting before an audience. What we may in the broadest sense call the “theater” is hence the place for actings appearance. And what the theater finally provides as the place of the political, is a technology for memesis. A mechanism for the imitation, for the repetition, of acts for those that were not there. The theater is the infrastructure of reappearance. The memetic circulation of acts, the means to assign value to them and propagate that value as a collective good by the public that mimetically imitates them.
The political stage provides a memetic estimate for what makes it worthwhile for people to live together; encouraging the repetition of the virtues it can only retroactively prescribe.
The space of politics, as a space for mimesis is hence pre and post political. It offers a space and form for the multiplication of actions’ contents. Not Athens but the Athenians were the Polis—as they liked to declare. The aim of the polis, of a space for politics, is merely to set the condition in which extraordinary acts become the ordinary occurrences of everyday life.
Authoritarianism always begins as a monopoly over the space of appearance and finally, ultimately, the complete severance of the right to appear from the right to exist. A form of mimesis without acts. The appearance of pure appearance. The desertification of the social realm.
4. Crowds
Crowds enter the stage only after the appearance of the subject in the space of the political.
The miraculous emergence of the crowd marks the scene of humanities raw reappropriation of their boundless power of acting. The crowd, like the act, is a force of unmaking.
And while the crowd poses a problem for social orders throughout time, it becomes a particularly threatening force during the feudal transition to capitalism. Made up of displaced peasants, fugitive serfs and former slaves; of witches, heretics and vagabonds; Feudal crowd formations were the nemesis of a system of rule that aspired to put all parts in their proper place; to measure and ascribe value to all things.
Crowd formations were both propelled by capitalist development – enclosures, displacements, urbanization, class formation and war; all those factors and forces that uproot and fragment the social body – while at the same time posing a critical threat to capital in their resistance to subjectification as labor-power, THE People, as citizens. From Hegel’s banishment of the rable from the rational state, to Le Bon and then Freud’s terror in witnessing the crowds power to erase the borders of the individual psyche; the crowd could be surmised as Modernity’s exemplary anti- subject.
Forever shifting in title from populus, plebs, vulgus, turba, or multitudo the crowd remains an insurmountable principle of negativity that condemns even the most stable and well ordered systems of governance to eventual ruin... the crowd is an expression of the people as an inconsistent multiplicity of needs, desires, and fancies; a collectivity whose form and logic obeys only the immanent laws of its own powers and capacities. The crowd, exceeding and belittling the law of scarcity, which is to say the law of the few over the many; is the abyss upon which all measure is established.
5. Memes with Force
Beginning in the spring of 1917, riding the wave of emotional euphoria evoked by the February Revolution, crowds began to propagandize the image of a “revolution-Easter” that would resurrect the people. Galvanized by the memetic circulation of this self-made holiday, state alcohol warehouses were ritualistically looted across the country. In September, it gripped Astrakhan D, Tashkent, Orel, Gomel’, Tambov, and Ufa; in October—Kharkiv, Starodub, Ternopil, and a series of other cities in the southwest of the former Russian Empire. In November, it overwhelmed Petrograd, and after the first rumors about the fall of the Provisional Government—the majority of provincial and district centers of provincial Russia.
The looting of alcohol reserves, in combining a display of physicality and sociality, elements of ritual and revolt, proved to be a radically contagious mimetic force that gave everyone the opportunity to storm their own white palace.
Despite capitals systematic effort to repress the crowd and eliminate its sources, crowd formations and their theological ingressions persist today as that irresolvable negativity of the law of bodies I spoke of earlier—a negativity every order of scarcity is necessarily established upon.
Today’s crowds variously practice the “schwarmers” storming of heaven by manifesting the “city of data’s” limitless abundance of communicative, symbolic, and subjective capacities in the “city of man”.
Defying capture by the corporate digital domain which polices and profits through the incescenat ascription of “data-to-subjects”; the crowd of today practices an insurgent virality. Breaking the ascriptive power of capital’s “data-as-subjects” logic, the digital sphere is recircuited into the liberated domain of “data-as-crowd”. In data-as-crowd the circuit governing the relation between data and reality is no longer defined by subjects, but through the anonymous, mutating, and deterritorialiing force of the meme.
Contrasting this phenomenon of memes with force to the “social movement paradigm” that “refers to a process by which groups get organized around their experience as constituencies of institutionally recognized social categories, Adrian and Wohlleben point to the Yellow Vests in France to speak to the potential of what they call “memetic composition”. As they state: “donning a safety vest carries with it no unifying ideology, principle, or demand, nor any particular subject- position or identity. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement.
Memetic composition by contrast to the social movement paradigms “constituent composition” is argued to hold “the power to suspend the suspensions that define our metropolitan social separation. Differences of experience or ideology are neither effaced nor resolved, but their resolution no longer forms a precondition for engagement with others. The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, like a Tarot deck in which the audience fills in the personal content.”
Another instance of the crowds insurgent memetic force can be found in T’s essay on the Jin Jiad azadi movement in Iran. In the essay Figuring a Women’s Revolution. T reflects on the liberating potentiality of bodies interacting with their mediatized images. Living in a smaller city, the first signs of the movement appeared to T through social networks where images were circulated of crowds rupturing every prescription placed upon the body by the regime. As T accounts:
The first moments of being “there,” in the street, surrounded by protestors, were extremely strange. Only a day earlier, I had watched these protestors from behind a cellphone screen, marveling at their courage, choking up, and weeping at their actions. I looked around me and tried to synchronize the images of the street with the reality of the street. What I saw firsthand was very similar to what I had previously viewed on screen, but there was a gap between the spectator-I and the I-in-the-street that took a few short moments to recognize. The space between me and the images I had desired had grown very small. Imyself was those images. I would suddenly see myself in a circle burning headscarves, as though we had always been burning scarves. I would suddenly become conscious of myself and would realize that I was being beaten just a few moments earlier.
For T the circulation of images didn’t only act as a documentative force for the regimes loss of control over subjects, but actively recircuited the relation between images-and-subjects. The image became a force of disruption of the order of appearence; propeling bodies into action without their subjects. As T continues:
Images are published and distributed, and they arouse the imagination of bodies. People thereafter go to the street not with the bodies that they are, but with the bodies that they can and want to be. With their own imagination. Their revolutionary act is to incarnate this imagination. In truth, in this tying-together of image and street, representation and reality mutually orient one another. Dream/representation/incarnation can impose itself on reality. Becoming that image, and at the same time, arousing the desire of other bodies to become. The chain of images: “the short-circuiting of the street with virtual space.”
More than either a regression to primitive communal nature or the individuals pathological capitulation to a cult personality, what if we looked to crowds as forces capable of birthing new forms and spaces for a politics of acts?
If the theater offers a space for the organized appearance of boundless acts; the crowd, insofar as it could be seen as a “meme with force” is a breaking of the theaters 4th wall, the viral discharge of mimetic circuity into the unsanctioned, unplanned, theaters of life.
In this sense, crowds don’t only disrupt the order of appearance but offer an all together different groundwork for the political. This space may be understood through the concept of compereance (co-apperance). Unlike the order of apperance, which is always seperate from acts, comperance unfolds through a space in which acts and stories ceaselessly dislocate one another through contagious interplay, mutation, diffusion. Here we encounter a political force that by making what was once enclosed and separated shared, declares that the symbolic other is no longer the limits of the self, but an ecstatic encounter that mutually incompletes the we. Through the de-individuated sharing of acts and their appearances, the crowd affirms that the being in me is outside myself and inside myself.