Article Political acclamation, social media and the public mood Mitchell Dean Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark Abstract This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value- creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. Keywords acclamation, algorithms, Big Data, political theology, public, social media, democracy In 1928, some five years before he joined the National Socialist Party, the jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt (2008: 274), made the following extraordinary forecast: It is fully conceivable that one day through ingenious discoveries, every single person, without leaving his apartment, could continuously express his opinions on political ques- tions though an apparatus and that all these opinions would be automatically registered by a central office, where one would only need to read them off. That would not be an especially Corresponding author: Mitchell Dean, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porce- laenshaven 18B, Frederiksberg 2000, Denmark. Email: md.mpp@cbs.dk European Journal of Social Theory 1–18 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1368431016645589 est.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on November 20, 2016 est.sagepub.com Downloaded from