Oi! Why is it that when more boyz get in a mob, they become more killy? Or, to put the question in a more academic parlance, what is the connection between crowds and power? Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960) presents an enduring theory of mass behaviour, examining how crowds form, move, dissolve, and relate to structures of command. This presentation explores the Orks of Warhammer 40,000 as a living instantiation of Canetti’s crowd; a species whose biology, culture, and cosmology are organized entirely around the logic of mass behaviour. Central to Ork life is the Waaagh: a spontaneous and shared eruption of communal aggression that manifests as both military campaign and metaphysical event. In doing so, the Orks enact a radical form of crowd-being in which hierarchy, belief, and matter are bound together by momentum alone. By applying Canetti’s categories to egalitarian, ecstatic, and violently transcendent life-world of the Orks, this presentation seeks a speculative anthropology of the mass in its most honest, terrifying, and exuberant form.
Author bio
Dr Richard Aubrey Slaughter has a degree in Informatics from the University of California, Irvine. He currently teaches ethics in information science, and uses Warhammer as a teaching tool.
