1 NOTE: This is the author’s text of an essay published (as a response to the special issue) in Cultural Studies 27.3 (2013), 496‐518, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2013.769155#. This essay appeared online in March 2013. Please cite or quote from the version as it appears in print. I am happy to provide colleagues without institutional subscription to Cultural Studies copies of this article (on a non‐commercial basis) in its published form, on request. Please email me at: a.vandervlies@qmul.ac.uk The People, the Multitude, and the Costs of Privacy in South Africa’s Postcolony Andrew van der Vlies Abstract: In this engagement with the idea of the common in contemporary South Africa, the author uses three episodes from his own experience in and of South Africa—a performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2009; a bus journey from Cape Town in 2010; news of the Marikana mine massacre in August 2012—as well as recent work by theorists Lauren Berlant, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, as prompts to explore how issues of public and private feature in recent representations and experiences of the South African postcolony. In responding to several of the essays included in this issue, the author also discusses the role of the institutions and infrastructures of cultural mediation in the production of cultural products that engage with these issues, and gestures towards the responsibilities of intellectuals and artists in interrogating their own positions in relation to the idea of the commons in South Africa. Keywords South Africa; the commons; privacy; cultural mediation; material cultures; postcolonial ethics; temporality; Marikana; Brett Bailey. The experience of the contemporary […] multitude is primarily rooted in this modification of the dialectic of dread‐refuge. The many, in as much as they are many, are those who share the feeling of “not being at home” and who, in fact, place this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis. Furthermore, in the multitude’s mode of being, one can observe with the naked eye a continuous oscillation between different, sometimes diametrically opposed, strategies of reassurance (an oscillation which the people, however, do not understand, since they are an integral part of the sovereign States). Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude [2004: 35] In the spirit of public‐private intersections, three episodes from my own recent experience present themselves as occasions to reflect on some questions raised by this collection. What is it to have something in common in contemporary South Africa? What, following