Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today's science wars.At the start of the 21st Century, ...

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical ...

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

This paper addresses the visual discourse of psychopharmaceuticals, such as Prozac, in order to investigate the network of relationships of affects, advertising, design and the production of new identity practices. As psychopharmaceuticals enter the public sphere through television and print advertisements, as well as first person narratives increasingly promoted in the media, the cultural discourse surrounding their use and the identity of the users are also changing. Drawing from a Spinozist notion of affect, ‘the trace of one body upon another’, (...) as well as from a semiotic analysis of advertisements, I intend to examine the identity practices and the type of embodiment emerging in, and envisioned by, the increasingly normalised object ‘psychopharmaceutical’. The centrality of affects in the constitution of subjectivity is increasingly relevant to contemporary critical theory (see the notion of ‘affective turn’, Clough). Addressing the network of affective investments we exchange with objects is crucial for an understanding of how embodied subjectivities mutate accordingly to the objects they interact with. Against the theoretical backdrop provided by what Nikolas Rose calls the ‘pharmaceutical biopolitics of the neurochemical self’, the analysis of packaging, colour, visual and textual language of their advertising suggests how new scripts of selfhood are inscribed in the relationship between users and psychopharmaceuticals. The ensuing dialogue among chemistry, affects and design creates narratives of the self as a myth-making operation in which psychopharmaceuticals perform as objects imbued with magic properties. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Australia and Colombia, this collection of essays uses the workings of the human nervous system to illustrate concepts of culture.

Life, but not as we know it -- Still life in nearly present time -- Driving and the city -- Movement-space -- Afterwords -- From born to made -- Spatialities of feeling -- But malice aforethought -- Turbulent passions.

The paper argues that the work of Gabriel Tarde on imitation provides a fertile means of understanding how capitalism is forging a new affective technology which conforms to a logic of propensity rather than to means-end reasoning. This it does by drawing together a biological understanding of semiconscious cognition with various practical geometric arts so as to re-stage the world as a series of susceptible situations which can be ridden rather than rigidly controlled. The paper examines the advent of technologies (...) which attend to the variable geometry of so-called animal spirits in the realm of business and then, using Tarde's work as a springboard, considers some alternative means of understanding imitative rays which have less instrumental undertones. The paper is an illustration of the way in which biology and culture have increasingly become intertwined. (shrink)