Multitudes and singularities
I’ve been exploring the web site for the Stanford Humanities Lab collaborative research project on “the rise and fall of the crowd — particularly the revolutionary crowd — in the Western sociopolitical imagination between 1789 and the present”.
The site includes introductions to historical crowd theorists like Canetti, Kracauer, Park and Tarde, as well as historical quotations about multitudes and flows, isolation and rejoicing. Particularly fascinating for word geeks is the semantic history section, which looks at the etymology of ‘mob‘, ‘multitude‘ and ‘crowd‘, as well as the “abysses of meaning” in the Chinese word for crowd: ‘zhong‘. Small thematic exhibits include the underground palaces of the Moscow Metro, images of contagion, accounts of agoraphobia and state-organised mass formations - which reminds me of the amazing Bodies in Formation.
(via)