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The series examines the crowd from antiquity through modernity to the present as a dispositive, i.e. as a heterogeneous totality of ways of speaking, bodies, power techniques, affects, metaphors, sign processes and cultural practices in three interlocking fields: (1) Conceptual history and semantics: the conceptually complex figure of the crowd is examined at different levels of discourse and with regard to the various neighbouring terms such as mass, swarm, rabble. (2) Gender discourse and epistemology: The crowd implies gender issues that problematise the relationship between gender and crowd through women's bodies, swarms of girls, nymphs, muses, etc. (3) Representation and aesthetics: The various discourses of philosophy, literature and aesthetics are concerned with the relationship between the individual and the collective, the public and the inward, the haves and the have-nots, and thus questions of representation.