The Ambiguous Multiplicities. Crowds over, Across and within Individuals

Crowds are not mere collections of people but a veritable ‘state of the social’. But, how precisely to theorize crowd states? To tackle this question, I begin by reconstructing various ways in which, particularly at the end of the 19^th century, crowds have been investigated, appraised and, ça va sans dire, feared. I seek to highlight which were the major political and ideological stakes of such attempts at apprehending crowds as social multiplicities. In particular, the Italian Positivistic School (Lombroso, Sergi, Ferri, Sighele) and the French School of Criminal Anthropology (Lacassagne, Fournial, Bernheim) are examined.

However, a similar exploration cannot content itself with cultural history, as it inherently triggers a deeper examination of some fundamental puzzles in social epistemology. In a sense, I propose to reverse the question about crowds and other social multiplicities into the question of that is an individual and how can the boundaries of the individual be drawn. Association, I argue, can regarded as process of territorialization which institutes the individual by drawing boundaries which are made of a wide array of counter-balancing forces. The very difference between objects and environments depends upon such territorial acts.

Notably, such transversal vectors which determine the stand-off point between the individual and the crowd can never be found in a state of equilibrium. Rather, they show a kind of meta-stability; in other words, they form a fluctuating threshold of visibility. The constitution of social collectives, I submit as a provisional conclusion, can be best appreciated through a layered model whereby the individual is integrally reconstructed as a region located somewhere inside these thriving states.