Intensive Culture

Professor Scott Lash is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, as well as a a project leader in the Goldsmiths Media Research Programme. He is a leading name within sociology and cultural studies, has written numerous books and articles over the last twenty years, and is currently the managing editor for the journal Theory, Culture and Society.

This book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary culture. It re-reads key thinkers such as Nietzsche, Leibniz, Simmel, Benjamin, Bergson in order to assert the primacy of the vital and the social against the closed mind of instrumental reason. It develops an innovative theoretical platform to account for the place of the informational, the intensive, and the religious for re-thinking the fundamental questions of life, and how to live today. It is a fitting summation of Scott Lash′s challenging reorganization of critical and sociological theoryCouze VennNottingham Trent UniversityThis book is an engagement with the continuing dissolution of the symbolic in contemporary communication, in a critical reflection on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Leibniz to Luhmann. It is a provocative archaeology of today′s ′cultural capitalism′ and of its metaphysical baggage. For Scott Lash the opposition between ′intensive′ and the ′extensive′, i.e. Leibniz′s distinction between ′substance′ and ′system′, is eroded in the age of informational capitalism, as words become things and things become data. For Lash the future of capitalism is one in which this intensity takes over the logic - as ′intensive materialism′ - of the economy itself. Yet this very process entails the dissolution of both intensity and with it of the singular. Lash pursues this compelling line of thought through encounters with Simmel, Benjamin, Durkheim and Philip K. Dick (!)Bernard StieglerDirector of the Department of Cultural Development at the Centre Georges-Pompidou

• IntroductionCulture: Extensive and Intensive What is Intensive Culture?Ontology and ReligionOverviewSocial TheoryIntensive Sociology: Georg Simmel′s Vitalism Forms: From Cognitive a priori to Social a prioriValue: Nietzsche and SimmelSocial substance: from Labour to Life Monadology: Simmel, Bergson, MetaphysicsConclusions: Towards a Global Politics of FluxIntensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference Leibniz, Aristotle, Ontology Sensation, Perception, Knowledge Intensive CausationLanguage: Intrinsic PredicationSubstance and System: From Exchange of Equivalents to Exchange of DifferenceIntensive Language: Benjamin, God and the NameLeibniz and Benjamin: From the Monad to the WordIntensive Method: From Epistemology to TruthLanguage: Things, Man and GodIntensive Capitalism: Marxist OntologyIntroduction: From Commodity to DifferenceCausation and value: Aristotle and Marx Externalities: Intensive Capitalism and Neo-Liberalism Financialization The Intensive-material: Machines of Predication Intensive Politics: Power after HegemonyLanguage: Power becomes OntologicalTwo Types of PowerFrom Norm to FactFrom Representation to CommunicationCultural Studies: First and Second WaveIntensive Religion: Emile Durkheim′s Elementary FormsThe Soul: From Rite and Totem to Myth and AncestorThe Totem: Clan and EmblemAlimentary CommunionTotemic Vitalism: Durkheim and FreudExtensive Religion: Sociological CategoriesThe Social Fact: Metaphysical ThingsInformation Theology: Philip K. Dick′s Will to KnowledgeTransmigration(a) Faith versus knowledge (b) Dick′s St. Paul: Against Law and the Messianic(c) Christ′s mushroom: Salvation by Eating(d) Vast Active Living Intelligence System The Gnosticism of Philip K. DickHorselover Fat: Healing the SubjectValis: The MovieConclusionsIntensity: Ontology and ReligionIntensity′s Outside: Chinese Social Theory?