Summary
Contents
Subject index
Contemporary culture, today’s capitalism - our global information society - is ever-expanding-- is ever more extensive. And yet we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon which can only be characterized as intensive. This book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture. While extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of fixed equivalence; intensive culture is a culture of difference, of in-equivalence – the singular. Intensities generate what we encounter. They are virtuals or possibilities, always in process and always in movement. Lash carefully defines and distinguishes the intensive from the extensive tracking this change through key areas of social life including: SociologyReligionPhilosophy Language Politics Communication
Intensive Sociology: Georg Simmel's Vitalism
Intensive Sociology: Georg Simmel's Vitalism
Introduction
Lebensphilosophie, or vitalism, would seem, for social scientists and intellectuals more generally, to be back on the agenda. One of the most successful books in the social and cultural sciences in the past decade is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). Negri is a Lebensphilosoph. He is a vitalist. Negri argues for a restructured, anti-Hegelian Marxism, replacing labour with life as a central category. More accurately, he understands labour as life. For Negri, both labour and life are conceived as movement or ‘flux’. For him, class struggle is not for labour to oppose capital in the factory, but for labour to escape from the factory. The factory is prison. And class struggle becomes escape attempts. ...
- Loading...
