Beyond the Public Sphere; The Secret Agency of the Many

Abstract

This project seeks to reimagine human agency at scale. It does so first by destabilizing ideas of collectivity such as the “crowd,” “multitude”, and “proletariat,” and second, through exploring a new understanding of collective agency, one which is diffuse and pervasive. The first chapter charts the emergence of a vast, empirical non-identical Many within the last three decades of 18th-century Germany. During this time, the social structures of estate society were almost entirely eroded, but, critically, they were not immediately replaced by the new economic order of capitalist class society. Collectively the non-identical Many had no shared identity, or even a way in which to imagine a shared commonality. Chapter Two examines the influence exerted by the present-absence of this non-identical Many on the works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Lenz famously rejected the unities of time, action and place, and his plays were known for their disorienting formal structure. I argue that with the creation of his so-called “Komödie,” Lenz organizes his plays around a new sense of the interrelatedness of all individuals, an emergent sense of the totality of society, and that the seemingly fractured and chaotic form of Lenz’s plays must therefore be read as a co-authorship of the non-identical Many, a writing of a heterogeneous influence into the structure of the play itself. In the third chapter, I examine the inaugural 1788 edition of the Braunschweigisches Journal as a case study of a particular form of fragmentary, experiential writing which once again is the result of perceived pressure from a non-identical Many. The editors of this journal and others like it positioned their writing as a response to a new audience, one which they are unable to describe, except in the negative, as a “nicht Gelehrten Publicum,” bending their writing to match its imagined demands. I conclude by looking forward, suggesting that the figure of the non-identical Many could be a useful lens for understanding the rapid media changes which occurred in the early 20th century, as well as the relationship which exists between social media and the Many in our own time.