Chapter 4 - Crowds and Agility

Summary

In Chapter Four, “Crowds and Agility,” the project turns to the fully imagined agile movement and potential virtuosity of modernist crowds, their reworked vocabularies across, and between media, their effectiveness in turning situations to advantage, and their conflictual relations with federating powers, established inequities, and inherited elitisms. In order to demonstrate the full scope of potentials involved, the chapter opens up to range more widely across a variety of media, aesthetics, and categories of works within modernism that simultaneously contribute to contriving a social space and interfering with its undemocratic spectacularization. In its most fully realized form, the modernist agile crowd claims to be unclassifiable within previous categories of social fields, and insists on a fundamental heterogeneity at the level of demand and composition.