Interlinks Gilles Deleuze's critical philosophy with Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to unpack contemporary democratic politics as a contest for complexity-reducing orientation in sense.

Recently the distinguished feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has turned her critical acumen toward rethinking time and duration. Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories. Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

"The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily overshadows their political dimensions. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labor in creative industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today."--BOOK JACKET.

In this new collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, she examines topics such as Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Concomitantly, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences. This volume explores the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies at large. The volume is divided into four sections. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions which explore some of the ways in which new media works to produce and intensify affectivity. The essays making up the second part, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate and in other ways get hold of things in our recent and not so recent past – or fail to do so. The essays engage the affective production of presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century, and literary auto-fiction. The third part, Affective Thinking, examines various concepts, theories, and forms of thinking not so much to show how the thinking in question may inform the field of affect studies but rather in order to draw attention to the way in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to matters of affect. New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are the common themes of the essays in the final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.

A polymath and author of Laws of Form, George Spencer Brown, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown.

The »global« is permanently made and remade by how it is envisioned in political projects, in language, and in literature. Through a range of case studies, this book shows how practices of referring to the world actually constitute the global in its many facets. It aims to provide a sense in readers of how the global is not something »out there«, but that it is embedded in a wide range of the seemingly »everyday«. The contributions appeal to a readership from a background in Sociology, History, Political Science, Literary Studies, and Social Work.

Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.

This book offers a fundamental contribution to the literature on the creative industries and the knowledge-based economy by focusing on three aspects: urban spaces as key sites of capitalist restructuring, creative industries' policies as state technologies aimed at economic exploitation, and the role of networks of aesthetic production in inflecting these tendencies. It simultaneously goes beyond these debates by integrating a concern with the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the creative industries. As such, the book is relevant to researchers interested in the transdisciplinary project of a cultural political economy of creativity and urban change.