Theorizing the Democratic Crowd

Jason Frank's The Democratic Sublime is an exciting and astute intervention in democratic theory. It persuasively shows popular assembly to be a persistent, distinctive, yet also undertheorized feature of democratic politics. That is, despite its ubiquity, the physical gathering of political actors en masse has not been analyzed as a phenomenon that tells us something meaningful about the very nature of democracy. Indeed, Frank suggests that mass assembly is more often broached with apprehension. Ironically, it is popular assembly's proximity to popular sovereignty, its latent claim to approximate the latter, which sustains such suspicion. In Frank's striking analysis, this is the case not just for liberal sceptics or conservative critics. Contemporary radical democrats are especially keen to expose any collective purporting to embody or express a unified (sovereign) will as dangerous fantasy.

In order to grasp popular assembly as a distinctively democratic practice, Frank directs us to its aesthetic dimensions. This is the second of Democratic Sublime's key claims. Popular assembly involves questions of peoplehood, which in democratic theory are most often taken up in legal and constitutional terms. Democratic theorists aim to delineate grounds for the legitimate authorization and institutionalization of popular constituent power. By contrast, Frank foregrounds aesthetic questions of sensation, appearance, and representative form. In so doing, Frank very pointedly moves away from questions of identifying who the people are, to questions of how the people appear and act. Indeed, one of Frank's most compelling and important claims is that democracy continually re-enacts dramas of collective self-empowerment, in which the people appear to themselves as a people in the very moment in which they display the collective capacity to act. The turn to the aesthetic is crucial, for it is through sensation and imagination that democratic actors reflexively experience collective agency and bring it into being.

One major obstacle to appreciating these aesthetic elements is the long-standing commitment to secularization common to modern democrats, from Thomas Paine to Jürgen Habermas. Disenchantment is taken to be a historical fact as well as the ultimate telos of democratic politics. Frank's striking insight is that modern democracy in fact necessitates “new forms of political enchantment;” it places “new pressures on the collective imagination” and “unprecedented enticements of collective fantasy” (3). Following Edmund Morgan, Frank suggests that democratic sovereignty relies on a more “fictional fiction” than kingship. Unlike the king's body, the democratic people is never immediately present and visible but always a projection. The self-authorizing, impersonal, and collective sovereign of democracy requires and continuously elicits intense symbolic investment. Assembly is one central practice that re-stages and sustains such collective imagination; and in the form of the sublime, it imbues it with vivacity and power.

Radical democratic theory, following in the tradition of Claude Lefort, has tried to reckon with the imaginative paradoxes concomitant with democracy's disincorporation of power. But in an elegant and important critique, Frank suggests that it does so in a manner that all too quickly foregrounds the dangers of popular mobilization; unauthorized acts of popular assembly are suspected of latent totalitarianism, of fetishizing unity and embodiment that can only end in violence. Frank urges us to pause and dwell on the people's appearance and enactment as a distinct and powerful form of democratic representation. On the one hand, Frank is aligned with radical democrats in their suspicion of mass assembly as the true or direct embodiment of popular sovereignty. Rather, the democratic crowd is seen to make representative claims and open up spaces to expose and contest prevailing forms of representation. But in speaking of representation, the question that interests Frank is not primarily about the identity of the people and their authentic representation, that is, who is included or excluded in the symbolic constitution of collective belonging. Rather, what matters about the fact of assembly is the experience and practice of coming and acting together.

The bulk of Democratic Sublime then explores various conundrums around the aesthetics of assembly: questions of visual form, spectacle, and theatricality; ecstatic versus absorptive effects of collective rituals; the phenomenology of barricade construction; but especially and most profoundly, assembly as an instance of what Franks terms the democratic sublime. I understood the democratic sublime to be the aesthetic effect and experience which encapsulates the fear and awe of a self-witnessing, democratic people. The assembled people behold their own power and grandeur, taking active delight in this new-found collective capacity. My remaining comments raise two broad questions about Frank's innovative theory of the sublime. First, to what extent must the aesthetics of democratic peoplehood take the form of the sublime? I pose this by way of noting two prominent features of assembly, visuality and physical proximity. Second, I wonder to what extent expressions of empowered agency must entail something threatening, mysterious, and/or unorganized. Here I want to ask about the specificity of democratic assembly, especially vis-à-vis its revolutionary counterpart.

I pose these questions by way of an example from the repertoire of collective political action I know best, namely, the theory and practice of nonviolence. As I suggested above, one of the most compelling and important aspects of Frank's analysis is the idea that what is being manifested in popular assembly is the capacity to act. At its core, then, democratic peoplehood is a scene of collective self-empowerment. When Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the significance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this was what was precisely expressed as the distinct purpose and effect of nonviolent direct action. In King's words:

The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. (King 1958: 215)

For King, this was a collective moral-psychological transformation. When the called-for boycott was met with almost total compliance, it provoked a profound re-evaluation of African-Americans’ sense of themselves, as capable of transformative agency. Effective action was recursively revelatory, and what came into appearance was a community newly empowered and endowed with dignity and purpose.

In King's account, the image that first confirmed this agency was that of the empty bus on the morning of the first day of the boycott. Boycotts, like many acts of nonviolent non-cooperation, are purposefully dispersed and negative; the most consequential are marked by mass abstention and withdrawal. By contrast, the paradigmatic mode of popular assembly in The Democratic Sublime seems more concentrated: “the people out of doors” are characterized by physical proximity and aggregative energy. When Frank writes that images of peoplehood are necessary to mediate the people's self-empowerment, what kind of image does he have in mind? The reflection of the collective actor assembled and gathered? Or the sight of effective agency, that is, the passing buses emptied of passengers? In cases like Montgomery, the answer may well be both. The year-long boycott was sustained by twice-weekly mass meetings, in which participants would simultaneously re-commit to, reflect upon, and delight in their continued efficacy. Perhaps, then, these two aspects of popular assembly—enacted agency and physical proximity—ought to be more clearly distinguished. Both are visual and ocular, but perhaps in different ways and with different implications. Indeed, Gandhi often spoke of “ocular” demonstrations of nonviolence's efficacy, for example, when the actors and viewers are moved and persuaded through the nonverbal, visual spectacle of nonviolent protest. But the physical presence of others in Rousseau's silent assemblies or the new sociality engendered in barricade construction invoke diverse experiences and effects of assembly.

My second question has to do with how collective agency, capacity, and/or power is demonstrated in mass assembly. Gandhi and King very purposively linked the projection of power in nonviolent action to disciplined organization. Mass nonviolence works by formalizing action; rituals and rules conduct protest in nonviolent ways. While such action may still induce fear and violent resistance, its self-presentation highlights control and restraint, a portrait of collective and individual self-rule that seems removed from the sense of danger, disorder, spontaneity, and mystery that Frank attributes to the democratic sublime. This raises questions about specifically democratic modes of collective assembly. Frank willingly concedes that there will be many varied and competing figurations of peoplehood expressing different modes of empowerment. But most of the instances of democratic assembly explored in the book are scenes of revolution. How important is it to conceptualize these two forms of assembly—the democratic and the revolutionary—together? Does democratic assembly today carry that same threat of excess and disorder that revolutionary action invoked and worked through? When we look to the variety of forms of assembly today, they seem to have emerged from several traditions of mass action, from the revolutionary tradition to be sure, but also from liberal and party-orientated forms of mobilization as well as anarchist and nonviolent techniques of protest. Does the disorderly and dangerous sublime apply to them all, or only under some instances and forms?

These are just a few of the questions opened by Frank's immensely important and accomplished book. By bringing popular assembly to the center of theoretical analysis, and asking us to wrestle with its perils and possibilities, The Democratic Sublime is a model of how to critically analyze persistent, prevailing, but also troubling concepts at the heart of democratic practice. To simply celebrate or dismiss the democratic crowd is to misunderstand modern democracy.