In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

‘A rare and remarkable book.' Times Literary Supplement Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for ‘nomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement. Translated by Brian Massumi>

First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on the blackboard) at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couch grass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree. In "Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becoming revolutionary."

This collection of poems is about connectivity. We are all connected by concerns for global human rights and a sustainable global climate. A rhizome is a root system that connects seemingly separate plants, like a stand of aspen trees. These poems seek out and celebrate our common human roots.

Comprehensive reference on the characteristics of rhizomes, stems growing roughly horizontally below ground level, important for perennial and hard-to-control weeds and for the propagation of some commercially important crops. Rhizomes describes and compares rhizomes, classifies them based on their features, and presents their ecological and commercial importance. The book is divided into seven parts. After a short introduction, Part I discusses the evolution of rhizomes and their function as organs. Part II provides an introduction into rhizomes of basal tracheophytes, formerly called pteridophytes, now referred to as Lycopodiopsida and Polypodiopsida or lycophytes and ferns. Part III covers monocot rhizomes with a focus on the high diversity of rhizomes found in monocots. Part IV focuses on dicot rhizomes and their morphological diversity. Part V explores the ecological and commercial importance of rhizomes, with special information on crops and weeds with rhizomes. Lastly, findings on rhizomes in different plant groups are compared, and conclusions on the development and diversification of rhizome characters are presented. Written by two highly qualified authors with significant research experience in the field, Rhizomes covers topics such as: Difficulty in making a clear distinction between rhizomes, runners, and stolons and inner cortex cells of rhizomes differing in sheath modifications Different types of species with stem-borne roots, including dicot representatives with roots arising from the hypocotyl and plants with roots at nodes, internodes, and buds Molecular genetics research analyzing molecular mechanisms and signaling processes leading to stolon and rhizome initiation and development Rhizome producing species forming either large colonies or genetically identical groups, with advantages and disadvantages of each With English literature on rhizomes being relatively sparse, Rhizomes is a unique and highly comprehensive reference on these types of stems, ideal for agronomists, botanists, horticulturists, breeders, ecologists, and weed scientists seeking to understand their important role in agriculture and food.

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

This book discusses the various aspects, from production to marketing of turmeric and ginger, the world’s two most important and invaluable medicinal spice crops. The book begins with their origin and history, global spread, and goes on to describe the botany, production agronomy, fertilizer practices, pest management, post-harvest technology, pharmacology and nutraceutical uses. The book presents the economy, import-export and world markets involved with reference to turmeric and ginger. It would be a benchmark and an important reference source for scientists, students, both undergraduate and post graduate, studying agriculture and food sciences and policy makers. It would be of great interest to professionals and industry involved in spice trade.

This volume, Rhizomes, is a challenging path into a very multidisciplinary set of papers. Papers range across cultural studies and film, to applied linguistics to sociolinguistics; and as gathered in this one volume - the result of postgraduate student research of a very high order - they 'force' readers to think critically of disciplines, their assumed boundaries and most importantly, the usefulness of assuming the enduring value of such boundaries. This is not to say that ‘anything goes’, but the diversity of areas under scrutiny means that sharper re-thinking of one’s own comfort zones is necessarily one key outcome when confronted with a volume like this. This is one advantage of the selected papers – besides the obvious one of having at your finger tips a simple way of delving into a challenging diversity. Brian Ridge, Campion College, Sydney This is a wonderful collection of papers, which demonstrates the power and vitality of contemporary literary and cultural research. The scope of the papers, the diversity of the subject matter, and the willingness of their authors to work across disciplinary boundaries work together to create an exemplary collection of research for the twenty-first century – multidisciplinary, multigeneric, and multimodal, like 21st century texts and media. Greg Hainge’s opening paper sets the stage for the diverse and engaging papers that follow. With his own examples of rhizomatics drawn from music, Greg immediately has the reader acknowledging the multidisciplinary – and multimodality – of contemporary texts – and so the need for research that can address the richness and complexity of these texts. In Part 1 we have two papers that address the issue of the limitations of conventional research methodology in their own fields (language acquisition, film studies) – and propose alternative and more productive methodologies. The exciting thing about this section is that these are fields normally considered very different and without much to say to one another – and yet the combination works to create a dialogue that extends across these and many other fields of research. Most importantly, both challenge the dichotomising of research and analytical methods that has worked to impoverish their fields and the research on which it is based. Part 2 presents papers on a range of marginalised social positionings and experiences – and in the process demonstrates both the power of research to uncover what has been ignored or elided in contemporary histories (how many westerners know of the long history of Chinese women in film? Or of an Aboriginal Taiwanese literature?) as well as the power of new perspectives, new ways of thinking the research subject, to open up areas of study such as dating manuals and country music, both conventionally dismissed as inherently trivial and/or sexist. In Part 3 the papers all play brilliantly with the notion of connectivity, demonstrating for readers the inextricability of texts and meaning systems (verbal, visual and other) with the cultural contexts in which they operate – and so the diverse ways they may be deployed. These papers banish forever any reliance on a formalist reading or methodology for the analysis of text and meaning! And, again, the range of subject-matter is breath-taking and argues the need for cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research practice. Part 4 takes the reader into the realm of transformations, challenging the ways in which textual and systemic changes articulate profound cultural changes in the societies that produce them. So we learn about grammatical interventions in the Chinese language as feminine and neuter pronouns are added to the gender-free Chinese language – and consider the major cultural change that both caused this change and is subsequently produced by it. We consider the ways in which cinema has evolved as an art-form, under the influence of its material and verbal technologies. And we consider the ways in which Chinese poetry has entered a range of cultural practices in the west and the east, and again consider how its traditional meanings and significance are maintained and communicate to these new contexts – and the nature of the transcultural experience this generates. For the academic, student, or interested reader this collection offers a breath-taking scope of subject-matter and a vital and engaged approach to the material, that makes this collection a research ‘page turner’! Professor Anne Cranny-Francis, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney