The first quarter of the 21st century has brought about an era in which political life has a distinctive new character. Political leaders in the United States and beyond no longer seem beholden to the desires of the governed. While the mid-20th century saw the United States implement grand infrastructure, jobs, and entitlement programs, as well as civil rights laws and environmental safeguards, initiatives of this magnitude seem impossible now. And while in 2003, the invasion of Iraq was preceded by months of courting favorable media and public opinion, in 2026 Donald Trump’s administration barely bothered to frame the case for war with Iran. Public opinion, once a constant concern of political professionals, is now inconsequential. Corruption and criminality can be openly displayed, and consent no longer needs to be manufactured. The people simply regard, or choose to look away from, what those in power have in store for them.

Like the rest of us, political theorists are now reckoning with this emerging reality. In 2009, Jeffrey Edward Green observed that in Western democracies the vox populi, the notion of mass vocal participation in decision-making, had been eclipsed. Green proposes instead a model of spectatorial plebiscitary democracy, one that acknowledges the actual disenfranchisement of the masses, and which can therefore strive “for ideals especially suited to the fallen conditions that shape the way democracy has come to be experienced today” (2009:7). Green’s reformulated theory of the “democratic” political subjectivity that persists in today’s sclerotic postmodern republics is bracing. But both of the models he names—the vox populi and plebiscitary spectatorship—are alternative ways of conceiving of the agency of the “masses,” a distinctly modern notion of general political subjectivity. What if the shift that we are living through is the outcome of a transformation in the prevailing form of society—and the “masses” no longer exists?

There are abundant indicators that today’s political conditions can be understood as the long-term consequence of the “mass politics” that prevailed early in the 20th century. The historian Daniel Bessner argues that popular agency is now detached from elite decisions, and existing mass institutions (elections, unions, media) can no longer “force the power elite’s hand in meaningful ways,” because of a decades-long project to “[remove] the demos from politics” (Bessner Reference Bessner2022). According to Bessner, after World War II, elites perceived that mass political movements of the early 20th century had ended in catastrophe, and they took steps to reduce popular influence upon political leaders. This was done by creating a state apparatus that insulated leaders from popular sentiment. Where before World War II, politicians at the national level had to justify their policies to and directly hear from the citizenry, afterwards, federal agencies (including the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency) and think tanks (such as the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution) sprung up to enclose leaders within a milieu of serious expertise and debate.

This was part of a broader project to prevent mass political movements from steering policy, one that was motivated by the belief that ordinary people were too ignorant and manipulable to be allowed to directly influence leaders. The advent of mass societies—industrialized nation-states with populous urban centers, large and culturally deracinated workforces, and media such as print and radio—these elites believed, could be too easily steered toward irrational and destructive ends.

The current moment of political alienation can thus be seen as the century-long outcome of responses to the social dynamics of industrial societies. These responses were steered by particular theories of society as much as by emergent historical reality. US elites reduced democratic influence upon policy in the late 20th century because they feared what mass politics could yield. Fascist and communist mass movements provided object lessons, and social theory supplied beliefs about the way large-scale social structures affect individual behavior. William Kornhauser’s Reference Kornhauser1959 study The Politics of Mass Society laid out the case that in industrialized nations, local groups and networks can wither, leading to a general state of atomization and alienation. With diminished intermediate associations (e.g., churches, clubs, clans, occupational groups) to structure the communicative fields between elites and nonelites, Kornhauser argued, isolated individuals are available for elite manipulation and susceptible to extremism. A “mass society” is one where “both elites and non-elites lack social insulation; that is, when elites are accessible to direct intervention by non-elites, and when non-elites are available for direct mobilization by elites” (Kornhauser Reference Kornhauser1959:43).

This formulation drew heavily upon Émile Durkheim’s theory of attenuated solidarity and heightened anomie and egoism in industrial societies ([1893] 1997). It also held that the structure of the society, rather than charismatic leadership or material conditions, was determinative to the political order. While Durkheim had argued that the isolation generated in industrial societies led to alienation and suicide, Kornhauser applied this analysis to its effects upon democratic institutions. He argued that mass societies, unless they are pluralistic, lack a rich tissue of “intermediate relations” such as one finds in a club, local church, or masonic lodge, leaving individuals atomized and open to direct relatedness to elites. As Kornhauser explains, “the structure of mass society must be of such a nature as to support a high rate of mass behavior” by fulfilling two requirements: “accessible elites and available non-elites” (74).

The disorienting feeling of this moment, when political subjectivity is reduced to impotent critical spectatorship, may well be the effect of a deliberate response to the historical consequences of early 20th-century mass politics. But Bessner’s account raises another question: have the conditions and political potentials of “mass society” remained in effect? If, as seems beyond dispute, the political character of a society is determined by its systemic contours (its major economic relationships, communication dynamics, and identity differences), then the politics of our present must be an outcome not simply of elite manipulation, but also of changes to the factors that inform social life. The early 20th-century industrial societies that yielded mass politics have changed. Deindustrialization, the diminishment of centralized legacy media organizations, and the rapid advent of digitally mediated information and culture all suggest that the mass society that concerned Durkheim, Kornhauser, and others has been surpassed by, or at least now incorporates, new social structures. What kinds of politics, behaviors, and culture might be possible in this bewildering new era?

Two remarkable publications last year from the University of Michigan Press offer illuminating perspectives on the relationship between performance and the social dimensions of political life by attending to different performance practices that emblemize, respectively, the epoch of mass society and the brave new world that has taken its place.

Kimberly Jannarone’s Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens (2025) examines large-scale embodied displays as a distinctly modern category of theatrical performance. This sophisticated and ambitious study commences with an in-depth look at the major festivals of the French Revolution, which amount to the genesis of the modern mass performance tradition. Attending to performances involving 1,000 or more performers across two continents and over two centuries, Jannarone offers perceptive summaries and analyses of a set of nationalistic—and in many cases state-administered—mass performance systems: Czech and German 19th-century mass gymnastics movements, Nazi mass spectacles (including a fascinating genealogy of the “Roman salute,” which has recently appeared, again, in the US repertoire of political gestures), Soviet-era Czechoslovakian Spartakiads, and finally, the mass gymnastics of contemporary communist North Korea.Footnote ¹

Jannarone’s study is a significant contribution to theatre and performance historiography, since it identifies a set of practices that is rarely examined from the vantage point of performance. While some of these phenomena have been studied before in books including Mona Ozouf’s Festivals and the French Revolution (1988) and Claire E. Nolte’s The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (2002), Jannarone has brought them together in a way that allows for a comparative approach. This grouping also supports her contention that mass performances, besides producing awe-inspiring spectacles, functioned, for their organizers, as potent techniques of social control. Per Jannarone’s interpretation, mass performance systems did not primarily serve to project power to would-be rivals. They instead aimed both to impart a habitus—“a way of being in the world”—to the citizenry, and to control the violent potential inherent in “the power of massed people” (10, 66).

Mass Performance has many virtues, including its historical and geographic range, its direct and engaging prose, and the way Jannarone identifies a distinctive performance tradition in varied contexts. She identifies the common tendencies of mass performances and their appeal without getting caught up in technicalities or succumbing to an ahistorical flattening of the phenomena. While at times Jannarone’s penchant for lurid details (she cites reports of French onlookers who dipped bread in the blood that ran from the guillotine, and the “emaciated corpses” that “washed down the rivers into South Korea” during North Korea’s famine of the 1990s) suggests that she shares postwar elites’ wariness of mass politics, on the whole her treatment of mass performances and their contexts is balanced, sensitive, and stays close to the facts.

It is another virtue that Jannarone fits the topic within the modern era; indeed, mass performance in her treatment is a performance “of modernity” (6–8). Defining mass performance simply by the number of participants might have included ritual re-enactments such as the Abydos Passion Play, or pilgrimages such as the Muslim Hajj. But by rooting the book in the historical particulars of the era of nation-states, Jannarone avoids a formalist analytic approach, and poses the phenomenon in such a way that the sociological and political interests of elaborate cultural performance systems are made clear. For instance, Jannarone’s study suggests that the era of mass politics, which historians including Bessner identify with the 20th century, in fact reaches back to the revolutions of the 18th century. While they lacked the centralized media of radio and television, French Republican cultural agents made use of multimedia visual culture, theatrical costume, and printed materials, which sustained the “organic,” “pedagogical,” and “systematizing” discourses that Jannarone identifies as accompaniments to mass performances (11). Thus, while in a relatively archaic technological moment, the massification of the French people could be accomplished through these means, as well as through the original form of mass communication, what Jannarone calls “organic co-presence,” which is to say, the basic medium of performance (67).

Among the many points of common interest between Mass Performance, and Branislav Jakovljević’s fascinating new book, The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors (2025), is the relationship between performance and ideology. For while, as Jannarone notes, mass performance systems may seem to be preparatory regimes for agricultural, industrial, or military undertakings, “[t]heir primary function has always been group identity formation” (8). This dynamic appears in several mass performance systems. Jacques-Louis David’s Festival of Unity “was a mass participatory event in which sensations—the concrete stuff of ideas—would directly instill” Republican ideals (45). The Czech gymnastic display, or Sokol, “articulated a collective worldview […] expressed in gestures, words, attitudes, and rituals. It […] created a fully embodied ideological system” (98). Jannarone thus shows that, throughout the era of modern nation-states, cultural ministers and stage managers have known that ritual can produce beliefs and self-conceptions. In this light, Jakovljević’s intervention into performance theory and performance art appears even more necessary. Together, the books suggest that a recent transition in prevailing social structures has manifested in the scale of ideologically driven performance practices.

The Performance Apparatus begins by noting that Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology is curiously marginal (if not entirely absent) from the critical repertoire of performance theory. This fact is even more striking when one notes that the French Marxist’s notion of interpellation was of critical importance to Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Indeed, in his most widely read essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971), Althusser makes ritual and the material practices of the body the site of ideology’s manifestation in social life. In a truly revelatory act of critical intervention, Jakovljević demonstrates that by linking both J.L. Austin’s concept of performative action and Althusser’s notion of hailing as ideological subjectivization to a ritual, Butler stages a “belated encounter” between performance theory and the Marxian theory of ideological apparatuses (7). While for Althusser and Butler the concept of ritual is loosely defined, signifying conventional (rather than elaborately codified) bodily actions, Jakovljević shows that for both theorists, these sorts of bodily practices bring the subject into being.

With this argument solidly explicated in the first chapter, The Performance Apparatus provides the basis for recuperating the concept of ideology within performance theory, and extending this insight to a novel analysis of performance art. For Althusser and certain of his interlocutors, ideology (which represents “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” [Althusser (1971) 2001:109]) has a material existence through which it affects individuals. Althusser defines “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs) as a “certain number of realities” that manifest in institutions, including churches, schools, the family, and cultural institutions ([1971] 2001:96). Jakovljević proposes (citing Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, and Althusser’s writing of the 1960s) that for Althusser, ideology operates beyond these discrete institutions. A subtler apparatus comes to bear upon our behavior in the interstices between them, one that Althusser compares to a pervasive sort of theatrical direction with which we unconsciously comply. This broadly felt apparatus subsists on the level of behavior, and according to Jakovljević, performance art, which emerged first in the same decades as Althusser’s critique of ideology, provides the practical counterpart to Althusser’s critique. For Jakovljević “[performance art] practice amounts to a powerful theorization of behavior” (17).

With this, Jakovljević shows how performance theory might recuperate the concept of ideology. His proposal has broad implications for the field. It suggests that Marxian critical theory, which operates at the margins of performance studies, might be folded back into its mainstream. But The Performance Apparatus pursues its immediate consequences in subsequent chapters, where conceptually organized case studies show that performance art since the 1970s carries out an embodied critique of ideology in ideology’s very own mode of concretization. In each of the second through seventh chapters, Althusser’s theory of ideology is explicated through at least one instance of 1970s experimental art. This opens up a conceptual theme through which these and later artworks are shown to immanently critique the ideological production of behavior.

For instance, chapter two commences with Stephen Willats’s 1970s “social art,” wherein participants in some cases approached residents in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods with social behavior questionnaires while dressed in “space suits” and claiming to be “from the 21st century” (28). These interactions were part of Willats’s “behaviorist” way of conceiving how art acts upon its audience. Jakovljević shows how this isolation of a behavioral dimension in experimental live art aligned strongly with the social scientific orientation of Richard Schechner’s notion of the “entertainment-efficacy dyad,” and thus recasts the happenings of Allan Kaprow as comparable behaviorist aesthetic exercises (Schechner Reference Schechner1974). From this 1970s template, Jakovljević then launches a brilliant interpretation of the current state of surveillance capitalism, drawing upon Shoshana Zuboff’s coinage for the algorithmically driven digital harvesting and monetization of “behavioral surplus” that characterize the function of social media platforms (Zuboff Reference Zuboff2019). For Jakovljević, these capitalist entities have displaced the ISAs Althusser had in mind, and have brought about “industrial-grade subjectivation” as they subtly motivate our micro-performances or “performemes,” which can now be easily captured, circulated, and monetized (51–53).

Subsequent chapters follow comparable procedures, revisiting 1970s experimental artists from the vantage of their behavioral and ideological preoccupations, tying these to facets of Althusser’s ideology critique, and then moving to readings of contemporary artists that update the gestures of the earlier generation. This template is less applicable to the third chapter, which examines Amiri Baraka’s attempts to consciously (and somewhat paradoxically) develop an aesthetic apparatus for his evolving communist ideology, than it is to, say, the seventh. In that chapter, Clive Robertson’s 1975 recreation of a 1965 performance by Joseph Beuys is the springboard for both an analysis of Marina Abramović’s “reenactment and reconstruction” works in the 2000s and a consideration of the way Canadian transgender artist Cassils (inspired in part by the work of Eleanor Antin) situates their body amidst both analogue and digitally supported apparatuses, revealing the corporeal prods and burdens of gender ideology. Jakovljević’s complex methods vary from chapter to chapter, but the many forays to mid-1970s aesthetic experimentation provide a key to the book’s investigative modus. In that decade, performance theory and performance art appeared on the scene, just as Althusser grounded the Marxist theory of ideology in “material practices,” which are enacted bodily: in kneeling, gesturing, shaking hands, and other such incorporation rituals (Althusser [1971] 2001:114).

Jakovljević’s erudition and the sophisticated intellectual history and performance analysis combined in the chapters make them difficult to summarize, despite the exhilarating payoff each contains. While the theoretical primer offered in the preface and first chapter ably sets up the concepts that prevail throughout the book, some readers may find themselves lost in the intricacies that tie the chapters together internally. A developed roadmap might have made the book easier to access.

Despite their divergent methods and subjects, these two books fit together in ways that magnify the light that each casts upon the institutional expedients that shape performance behaviors. Where Jannarone systematically explores the history of nationalistic (and otherwise ideological) systems of mass performance, Jakovljević mines the theory of a late Marxist-Leninist philosopher to explain how performance art exposes the apparatuses that persist in shaping even what appears to be highly individualistic behavior. Both authors would seem to concur that in modern societies, widespread conventional behaviors serve the ideological function of instilling beliefs and other “representations” that allow for some degree of elite control.

Beyond this, it is worth considering where the scope of each book ends, and where the claims of one might complicate the argument of the other. For Jannarone, mass performance systems “aim to produce embodied ideology” (8), and beyond the orchestrated movements of the performances themselves, she argues that they impart to participants a Bourdieusian habitus, a partly conscious “internalized structure” that guides behavior according to implicit but objective cultural principles (9). This would suggest that within the societies that supported mass performances, these systems influenced patterns of life beyond their direct implementation, providing a means of control over the population. Thus, Jannarone presents the behavioral control mass performance promised their planners as a matter of both the ideology they impart to participants, and the normative effect of modeling ways of life in line with “the new national ideal” (10). While this notion of habitus seems to be in line with the way that Jakovljević poses the behavior-regulating effects of ideological apparatuses, the latter, unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, require both a set of ideas or “representations” and a material substance. Jakovljević, moreover, identifies habitus with an anthropological tradition, and as “substitute” for the materialist analysis that ideology critique implies (xviii, 43–45).

One should not make too much of the divergence in Jannarone’s and Jakovljević’s handling of habitus as an alternative framework, for it is also the case that the two, by addressing mass performance and performance art respectively, situate their analyses in distinct sorts of societies. The emergent and “nationalizing” nation-states of post-Revolutionary France, 19th-century Germany, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and contemporary North Korea, which produced exemplary mass performances, while distinct among themselves, arguably each sustained homogenizing national cultures, however much these were organic or deliberately fabricated imagined communities. The viability of mass performance in these places may suggest in the first place a social field in which the semiautonomous norms of habitus can passively receive their cues from state-sponsored projects with less interference than may be the case in the liberal capitalist republics where performance art later flourished. The late 20th-century English, US, Canadian, and even French milieux in which the majority of Jakovljević’s analyses are situated, due to their capitalist liberal tendencies, may be more fertile ground for ideology critique.

Finally, the distinct and complementary historical ranges of these books return us to the question of the specificity of “mass society.” Jannarone’s book commences by noting that the era of mass performance is most likely at an end (xiii). North Korea’s ongoing culture of mass gymnastics, within an isolated dictatorial communist state, provides an exception that proves the rule. The social structures typical of early 20th-century industrialized states—a large, urban proletariat, connected primarily by centralized mass media, organized principally into primary (family) and national forms of association—are becoming relics. Deindustrialization, fragmented media and information systems, transient digitally mediated associative groups, and globalization have profoundly altered the social conditions that supported mass politics and the mass performances during the era of nation-states.

The 1970s, as Jakovljević points out (xvii, 53), witnessed not only the advent of performance art and performance studies, but also the rise of neoliberal policy in the United Kingdom and the United States. The resulting deregulation of international trade, finance, and broadcasting helped speed the demise of mass societies. While elites, to accept Bessner’s account, worked over generations to inhibit the will of the demos and contain the dangers of mass political movements, the conditions that enabled such movements evaporated. The resulting cultural conditions are our own. Against this backdrop, the contrast between groups of 1,000 or more moving in unison, and individual performance artists (or isolated digital influencers), presents itself as a marker of a profound transition. Through the contrasting scale of their subjects, as much as through their originality and rigor, Jannarone and Jakovljević, read together, evoke a striking trajectory in the modern history of performance culture.