Afterword

The presumption of a ‘silent majority’ provides the source material for numerous claims made, in the media and elsewhere, on behalf of the public. Such a public has a right, or so the argument goes, to receive a representation worthy of itself. In the name of democracy the margins are thereby reduced to a single voice, and all of their different activities, their multiple arts of consumption, are either totalised or discarded without serious contemplation. This totalisation is a kind of public violence, or more exactly the violence of the public, of a public whose hegemonic articulations mute those voices and reduce those differences that compose it.