On 'The Masses'

One of the classical debates in social theory hinges, it seems, on the concept of mass population and its connection to the concept of peoplehood as opposed to unbounded relations between actors. I would argue that, besides their engagement with capitalism and the relation between material reality and ideas, Max Weber and Karl Marx's biggest disagreements came from the transformation of actors into masses atomized in civil society. In fact, without the masses' presence, it is hardly conceivable that capitalism and class could be reduced to market position or bargaining power, and the corresponding life chances that result from it. It would hardly be possible to model class oppression as a stratified system of income distribution, with individual needs amenable to welfare state policy/programs, if the 'individuals' were not already separated as agents. 'Inequality' can only be understood, and formally measured, if there is a fundamental reference point, and with 'massification,' inequality becomes relative to the public sphere of 'national society,' and a determinate, calculable 'social product.' The emphasis on equality/inequality covers over issues of oppression and conceives power as a sovereign (possessed by the nation or People) and repressive structure of domination - a model of negative liberty for Weber - rather than as productive potential for social needs and action. It consolidates control over the population because they lack the ability to relate outside their demographic and constituent location or identity; they are known by 'discursive' gazes from above. This is the background against which rational 'interests' are articulated in 'civil society' and the marketplace, and in which party politics atomizes different constituencies of people. In fact, if we look at different 'spheres' of social life - such as labour and collective bargaining, voluntary associations, juridical disputes, sexuality, and even when people get together with the conscious aim of enjoying themselves - actors are positioned as discrete parties with the separate and opposed self-interest of each constituting the sovereign power to govern them. Notions of interest predicated on desire assume an homogenous form of action articulated around subjectivity (subect-positions) and agency. Action here is dependent on consciousness (the rational calculation of self-interest), otherwise it falls back into the bare life of thinghood, i.e.,  being 'in-itself.'

But since there is no underlying structure/form that is not at some level a product of past struggles, projects, campaigns, and formations, political action is not confined to the agency of the party representing social interests which presumably have an independence "as such" from it. The very founding of a "society" is and will always be "political," and may or may not rely on the state. Consequently, Weber's separation of the political from the economic and the cultural (social status) is based on a sleight of hand, but one which will continue to be possible so long as we reduce people or actors to mass populations of atomized individuals.

Moreover, in this context, any time a notion of public or interest-group in "civil society" is articulated, it is always as the converse of the State. The state can tolerate the existence of certain institutionalized or recognized forms of opposition if they remain constituencies subordinate to its constituted power. That is, while they are not identical to the state, their very "difference" is not genuinely "other" to the state, but is rather an internal difference defining the distinct pattern of a basically unified identity.

In this sense, the notion that publics can be emergent (as Ian Angus conceives in Emergent Publics, 2001) is a reified conception: emergent actors, practical assemblages, and institutions may generalize themselves beyond their immediate context, and affect the public sphere, but it does not follow that the concept of "public" can be applied to understanding them. When it is, it very quickly falls back into the idea that social movements serve a universal function for the nation-state (civil society aggregating population demographics) through diagnosing "social problems" internally dividing society. That "society" itself may be a convenient abstraction from social relations is not a question; rather, civil society theory and public discourse aims to ensure that this society remains operative, that causes/inputs align with effects/outputs, and so on. The affective dimension of the "imagined community" of nationalism is denied in the standardized formulas of rights and citizenship. Citizenship is a form of dignity based on guarantees of rights for individual agents who are re-constituted (reborn) in society according to the management of their standard of living. This abstracts from the specificities of class-formation: revolutionary activity now requires direction from the state/party and civil society's (intellectual) leadership. Given this, we must critique vanguardist and hegemonic praxis, since it is based on idea of mass population of separate individuals (bare life or physical bodies) integrated into an overarching body forcing unification, and it constrains actors to a dialectic of structure and localized agency.

What if if were the case that no mass population (being-in-itself) can exist in this kind of aggregated self-identical  form, adding separate individuals/parties into a bounded whole? What is there is no being-in-itself that is not already a being-for-others, or better, the the with-others? With that premise in mind, before trying to overcome the indignity of being-in-itself, there has to be a focus on the inter-subjective basis of action before either the subjective or objective, and moreover, a project/praxis that actively estranges our being-with-others from alienation in being-for-others, along the lines of what Franco 'Bifo' Berardi has suggested in The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009) in light of the Italian autonomist experience. By rejecting notions of recognition and identity as the basis of social life, we free the "agency" of dispositions from the constraining structure of subject-positions, while avoiding making dispositions a matter of free-floating individualized existence. Rather, it is that dis-positions and affects are patterned in certain meaningful ways in the social world such that they open up certain possible actions beyond conceptual articulation or public "discourse," and project actors ecstatically (ek-sistence means to stand outside as what Heidegger calls ek-stasis) to transform and become-other in the world without becoming another as they are threatened with in mass society.