The strangest of all wars has broken out. The Third World War is the Unreality War. Some call it the Hyperreal War, the war of the "more real than real". Reality can deliver only so much. Human fantasy, by contrast, knows no bounds. Reality acknowledges constraints. Fantasy doesn't. The hyperreal is where human fantasy, rather than reality, drives humanity's perceived reality. Actual reality is reduced to nostalgia. As technology improves, it delivers human fantasy with ever more power. It does so via vivid, luscious screens, the perfect medium of human fantasy. The World has been replaced by the Screen. The more people look at the screen rather than at the world, the more they are in hyperreality. Come inside and explore the strangest of all worlds.

A work that bridges media archaeology and visual culture studies argues that the Internet has emerged as a mass medium by linking control with freedom and democracy. How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones. Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace. The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

America is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand, says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers". The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the branding of America by changing the way information flows; the way institutions wield power; the way television stations are run; and the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he shows how to organize resistance against the power trust that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer items, by "dermarketing" fashions and celebrities, and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted age. A powerful manifesto by a leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first century -- a movement that can change the world and the way we think and live.

This is that most unusual of things ... a philosophical and spiritual novel, a katabasis and nekyia, venturing into the Land of the Dead, into the accursed world, into Capernaum. This is an exploration of Pandemonium, the city of all the demons. This is a journey to the magical Mistletoe world of Doggerland, the once and future realm. It is a Red Book, a chronicle of a descent into madness. It dispenses with many novelistic conventions in order to reach the heart of darkness.The Mistletoe Murders is a psychological and philosophical murder mystery drawing upon the great Arthurian tales, cast in a Nietzschean light.Heaven is on the far side of hell. To get there, you must travel through your nightmares. You must confront the profoundest archetypes. Those we have chosen are those of the world of King Arthur.Come and meet Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, Nimue, the Black Knight, the Green Knight, Mordred, the Fisher King, and many others. Venture into Camelot and the Grail Castle and find the Holy Grail. But you must endure the Wasteland - the end of hope - before you have any prospect of encountering the Grail.You must travel through the barren land to lift the curse that has brought universal misery. Only the hero can succeed. Only the hero can confront and overcome the physical and spiritual wounds that are infecting everything.All heroes must cross the threshold. They must leave the ordinary world and travel to the extraordinary world, where they will risk it all. They must leave this world for the Otherworld.What price will you pay? Would you risk it all to win it all? This is not a whodunnit, whatdunnit or howdunnit. It's a whydunnit. It's food for the brain. As Sherlock Holmes said, "I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?"

It is becoming ever clearer that while people tour cultures, cultures and objects themselves are in a constant state of migration. This collection brings together some of the most influential writers in the field to examine the complex connections between tourism and cultural change and the relevance of tourist experience to current theoretical debates on space, time and identity.

Presents a radical reassessment of Jean Paul Sartre's work, the systematic study of Sartre's relationship to postmodernism. This book explores the differences and similarities between Sartrean existentialism and French poststructuralism. It highlights the value and relevance of Sartre's work to our postmodern times.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying our audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectual and cognative domains. The author takes the reader through phenomenal aspects of the art of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.