Every time we talk about a _mass_ we invoke an _amassing_. Whether via ratings measurement, political fantasy, or aesthetic judgment, an assemblage presents itself. As Raymond Williams famously put it, there are “no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1997, 20). He took this nominalism one step further by claiming that we interpret masses “according to some convenient formula... it is the formula, not the mass, which it is our real business to examine” (20). In its nineteenth-century expression, the mass emerged as an idea composed of other ideas (of bodies, spaces, identities, and affects). On one end of the idea spectrum, the physical convergence of bodies in streets and squares pose a challenge to capitalist power consolidation: the _crowd_. On the other, the regulative ideal of a democratic assembly poised to deliberate on matters of concern: the _public_. Near this pole, experts attend to the apathy of mediated subjects, persuading them to participate in a political system ostensibly for their own benefit. Closer to the first pole, the target is _hyperpathy_, or excessive action (often through media practices) that might interrupt passage to the other extremity. Somewhere along the continuum, we encounter the _mass_: a...