The claim that the entity ‘the people’ exists advanced democratic government on the one hand, and on the other, afforded many people the opportunity to change their lives. However, it has not been agreed on what precisely ‘the people’ refers to, so that we may be justified in saying ‘the people’ has been a keyword in the sole possession of 20th century media and intellectuals.
Despite the many criticisms of ‘the people’ in the last half-century, we have not settled on answers to the questions ‘who are ‘the people’, ‘who can use this word’, and ‘how is it to be used.’ Moreover, the noise of theory has muffled the real questions, and in the 21st century present, when governments, under pressure from global structures, have intensified control of domestic scenes, understanding the ‘crowd’ and forming the ‘crowd’ have become issues we urgently need to confront.
Huang Chien-Hung holds a doctorate from the University of Paris VIII. His areas of research are the philosophy of images, aesthetics, and the film theory of Gilles Deleuze. He is currently Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Art at Taipei National University of Arts where he studies images and curating. His publications include An Independent Discourse (2010) and New Directions: Trans-Plex Weaving Platform Agenda (2011). He works in contemporary French theory and is a noted translator into Chinese of works by Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Rancière. He also writes criticism on the cinema, contemporary art, and performance.
