Mass
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).