Dispositive of the Crowd

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Wild
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422869835

The network investigates the crowd as a dispositive: as a heterogeneous ensemble that can be described by uncertain formations processes of discourse and the balance of power of crowd, people, mobs. Since the multitude, through its transition into plurality, is always threatened by the dissolution of its objectivity, it allows insight into the processes of its composition and decomposition; it provides insights into moments of figuration and defiguration that constitute them.The network will determine the crowd in its exemplary continuities from antiquity to the present. It opens up a field of research in which the figure of plurality is to be examined in a precise manner in philological, scientific and cultural studies in their historical, epistemic and aesthetic depth by means of individual examples. Three interlocking fields will guide the questions 1) Systematic / Conceptual 2) Discursive / Historical and 3) Aesthetic.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks