Why do crowds cause trouble? Exploring affective instability in collectivity

Abstract

Through our ethnographic study of urban activism collectives in São Paulo, we propose another approach for exploring the process of collective formations and their longevity. Rather than seeking out the representational meanings of individualized communities, we approach collectivity from the perspective of crowds. Crowds are affective. Crowds are contagious. By adopting affect-based theorizing, we discuss affective intensities that bring about collectivity before the individuals awaken to narrate their meaning-makings. In our ethnographic context, collectives resist manifestations of gentrification (i.e., consumer culture in itself) and offer us a multifaceted site of being and becoming with the crowds. We explore how connections and disconnections affectively rekindle the social expression of collective bodies in consumer culture. This way, we add new dimensions to extant theorizing of consumer collectivity that tends to focus on individualized meaning, stability, and harmony.

Object-oriented marketing theory

“…Equally, however, recent marketing and organisational research makes a counter critique, that concepts of subjective intention are obsolete (Hietanen et al 2020). Sociological analyses show how social contexts can thwart individual conceptions of the subject, such as when ‘individuals’ become part of a ‘crowd’ (Hill et al 2021; Lopez et al 2021). Equally, certain spaces can influence decision-making (Chatzidakis et al 2012; Coffin 2021b).…”

Onflow and consumption: Affect and first encounters

“…Affect is quite possibly the most difficult plane of human experience to describe. Yet every second of human life is suffused with the force of affective energies that vivify moments of experience, perception and knowing (Lopes et al, 2021). Affect encapsulates omnipresent, embodied processes and flows of life (Blackman, 2012) that circulate through material and non-material bodies, forever evading logical determination or capture.…”

“…They are perpetually open to affecting and being affected, to evoking change and having their world changed for them. When consumers engage with networks of affectivity, they are in a perpetual state of becoming (Lopes et al, 2021). Edbauer (2004: 17) suggests that 'before we can make sense, we sense.…”

“…This encounter between bodies is a relation of intensities’. Indeed, it is this relation of intensities around ‘things’ that assumes importance, rather than the ‘things’ themselves (Lopes et al, 2021). Consumers are bound up in these relations that often exert little tangible presence in research, but which are nonetheless pivotal in producing affect.…”

“…In consumer research, our experience of the world is often presented as a succession of ordinary moments that are offset by ephemeral escapes from a scripted, monotonous and banal ‘everyday life’ through the pursuit of extraordinary experiences (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). Such experiences are often consciously orchestrated by consumers in collaboration with the marketplace (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Diamond et al, 2009; Kozinets et al, 2004; Penaloza, 1998), nature (Arnould and Price, 1993; Edensor, 2000; Celsi et al, 1993; Canniford and Shankar, 2013), other consumers (Belk and Costa, 1998; Kozinets, 2002; Lopes et al, 2021), subjective imagination (Cohen and Taylor, 1992; Joy and Sherry, 2003), etc. Legitimating the need for such extraordinary experience in one’s life, ‘everyday life’ is presented as uncomfortably tedious; a burden, stressful and difficult to negotiate and live in, owing to its incessant rules, structures and rationality.…”