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 Capitalism: Marxist Ontology
Intensive Capitalism: Marxist Ontology
Introduction: From Commodity to Difference
Capitalism would, on the face of it, be seen as integrally extensive. At the heart of Marx's analyses of capitalism is the commodity, and these commodities are extensive. The capitalist commodity is abstract and homogeneous: it is interchangeable with a number of different concrete goods, again very much on the model of the atom, the smallest unit of extensity. This is a machine in which the extensity of the means of production engages with the extensity of labour to produce an extensive product. Capital itself is indeed a ‘social relation’, a social relation that works through the abstraction of the commodity and of labour power. Marx's labour theory of value understands capital to be ...
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