This book is a radical plea for the centrality of experience in the social and human sciences. Scott Lash argues that a large part of the output of the social sciences today is still shaped by assumptions stemming from positivism, in contrast to the tradition of interpretative social enquiry pioneered by Max Weber. These assumptions are particularly central to economics, with its emphasis on homo economicus, the utility-maximizing, instrumental actor, but they have infiltrated the other social sciences too. (...) Lash argues for a social sciences based not in positivism’s utilitarian a priori but instead in the a posteriori of grounded and embedded subjective experience. This features a politics of Hannah Arendt’s public sphere, which begins with the particular experience of Aristotle’s polis and moves - via Rome, Augustine and Kant - to a modernity that acknowledges the fragility of political worlds. Yet modernity is also a matter of technological experience and technological forms of life. Lash - starting from Aristotle’s technics and working through Turing’s and Shannon’s computer mediation – develops a novel account of technological experience, of how objects themselves experience. And here he finds a surprising convergence with Chinese cosmology’s ethos of dao, qi and li: the experience of the embedded multiplicity of the ‘ten thousand things’. This original book by a leading social and cultural theorist will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences, from sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and politics. (shrink)

The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will trace the (...) shift from hegemony or extensive politics to such an intensive politics in terms of: 1) a transition to an ontological regime of power, from a regime that in important respects is 'epistemological', 2) a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within and power as generative force, 3) a shift from power and politics in terms of normativity to a regime of power much more based in what can be understood as a 'facticity'. This points to a general transition from norm to fact in politics. From hegemonic norm to what we will see are intensive facts. The fourth section will look at this shift through a change from an extensive regime of representation to an intensive regime of communications. (shrink)

This article presents a case for the revaluation of vitalism in sociological theory. It argues for the relevance of such a Lebenssoziologie in the global information age. The body of the article addresses what a vitalist sociology might be through a consideration of Georg Simmel. The analysis works from the juxtapositon of vitalist monadology with postivist atomism. It shows how Simmel drew on the Kantian cognition to develop an idea of the social. Here Kant’s Newtonian atomism was transformed into Simmel’s (...) Darwinian atomism. ‘Form’, for Kant, is the a priori of the cognitive categories. For Simmel form is the functions that constitute the social a priori. The other of form is substance. Simmelian ‘substance’, we see, is understood as ‘life’. We view this in the context of Leibniz’s monadology. In this the monad is simple substance as difference. The monad is self-organizing, conceived on the lines of not the extensivity of res extensa, but the intensivity of res cogitans; the monad is possessed with memory as trace; it is comprised of relations of perception; it is reflexive. In each case monadology is systematically contrasted with atomism. We consider the Bergsonian and Nietzschean impetus in Simmel’s shift from Darwinian atomistic evolution to monadological creative evolution. We compare Marx’s labour theory of value with Simmel’s ‘life theory of value’. For Marx it is labour that makes up value-substance: for Simmel life is value-substance. We examine Simmel’s core notion of life as social substance: as a primordial inter-subjectivity of flux. We conclude with a contrast of such ‘flux’ and flow: of such a flux of ‘becoming’ and invention in contrast to the flows of domination of today’s global capitalism. (shrink)

François Jullien intervenes into the ontology debates to understand Chinese thought as an anti-ontology, but instead in terms of ‘life’, that is as a sort of vitalism. Chinese anti-ontology features the juxtaposition of the wu (there-is-not) with the you (there-is). This, I argue, maps onto theology’s counterposition of otherworldly and this-worldly. Here Daoism features an ascetic and unstratified wu in contraposition to Confucianism’s you of moderation and stratification. We contrast ontology’s causation with ‘efficacy’ in Jullien’s Chinese thought. We read Zhuangzi’s (...) ‘Equalization of Things’, where the inequalities of the you are equalized in the wu, as a sort of vitalist object energetics. We turn to Chinese ethics, and its driving virtue of yi. We understand the yi not as ‘righteousness’, which is a theological attribute of Christ, but instead as closer to political ‘right’, in China embedded in immanentist forms of life. Western Cartesian ontology is often contrasted with Chinese thought that works through a certain ‘analogism’. We read this, with Walter Benjamin’s Chinese ‘mimetic’ faculty, in terms of a vitalist energetics, a forcefield of the Ten Thousand Things. (shrink)

Scott Lash interviews John Searle, one of the foremost contemporary philosophers. Over the course of the conversation, Searle discusses his research into performativity, language and intentionality, the question of information and his account of social ontology. The conversation initially deals with the early influence of John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as Searle's relationship to phenomenology and the rest of the philosophical tradition. This offers a conceptual reconstruction of Searle’s work from multiple perspectives. Crucial concepts are highlighted (...) such as performativity, speech acts, intentionality and natural language. The discussion also touches on Searle’s recent debates around the questions of information and consciousness. The conversation ends with an overview of Searle’s social ontology, his theory of institutions and his relationship with post-structuralism. (shrink)

Topology is integral to a shift in socio-cultural theory from a linguistic to a mathematical paradigm. This has enabled in Badiou and Žižek a critique of the symbolic register, understood in terms of pure conceptual abstraction. Drawing on topology, this article understands it instead in terms of the figure. The break with the symbolic and language necessitates a break with form, but topologically still preserves a logic of the figure. This becomes a process of figuration, indeed a process of `deformation'. (...) Badiou/Žižek will then presume a break with the symbolic for `the real'. But topology entails the centrality of not the real but the imaginary. With Castoriadis, this imaginary is understood as productive and social, and with Sloterdijk as spatial. In our times this is a self-organizing socio-technical imaginary. For Niklas Luhmann these socio-technical systems engage in coupling. They structurally couple with other social imaginaries. Their self-organization, going beyond pure functionality, operates through semantic excess: an excess that organizes the system and is their structure. Such structural coupling entails semantic exchange, consisting of not just information but also of images. (shrink)

This entry is about the concept of vitalism. The currency of vitalism has reemerged in the context of the changes in the sciences, with the rise of ideas of uncertainty and complexity, and the rise of the global information society. This is because the notion of life has always favoured an idea of becoming over one of being, of movement over stasis, of action over structure, of flow and flux. The global information order seems to be characterized by ‘flow’. There (...) are three important generations of modern vitalists. There is a generation of 1840–45 including Nietzsche and the sociologist Tarde; the generation of 1860 including the philosopher Bergson and the sociologist Simmel; and the generation of 1925–33 including Deleuze, Foucault and Negri. Vitalist or neo-vitalist themes are particularly useful in the analysis of life itself, but thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Katharine Hayles put things in reverse. They understand not the media in terms of life, but life in terms of media. Thus a mediatic principle or algorithmic principle also structures life. If classical vitalism conceives of life as flow and in opposition to the structures that would contain and stop it, then neo-vitalism would seem to have its roots in something like a media or information heuristic. Thus there is talk today that ‘information is alive’. (shrink)

This article attempts to gain purchase on the information society via the notion of `technological forms of life'. It first addresses the idea of `forms of life'. Forms of life are a mode of conceiving of culture that arose at the turn of the 20th century in conjunction with phenomenology. Previously, in early modernity, culture was conceived very much on a representational model. The rest of the essay explores the possibility that a new paradigm of culture, i.e. technological forms of (...) life is emerging at the turn of the 21st century. Technological forms of life are understood as `culture-at-a-distance'. They are the flattening, stretch-out, speed-up and lift-out of forms of life. They are forms of life become non-linear. They involve the exteriorization of inferiority and reflexivity. (shrink)

Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of extensity, equivalence, equilibrium and the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s intensity, inequivalence, disequilibrium and the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in (...) contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The article argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour to abstract heterogeneous life. Material cause changes from the commodity’s units of equivalence to consist of informational units of inequivalence. Formal cause takes place through the preservation of form as a disequilibriate system through operations of closure. These operations are at the same time information interchanges with a form’s environment. Final cause becomes the deep-structural generation of information from a compressed virtual substrate. This may have implications for method in the social and human sciences. The article illustrates this shift with a brief discussion of global finance. (shrink)

This article attempts to re-think the notion of reflexivity in terms of non-linearity. It tries to understand the second modernity as a non-linear modernity. This second modernity is understood as much in terms of communications as social norms. It is a modernity that is thoroughly monist. It features non-linear socio-technical systems.

This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology — Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx — moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society becomes quickly one of social control and social order in (...) functionalism and Parsons. The article argues instead for an aposteriorist, de facto empiricist sociology that breaks with this ultimately normative question. This aposteriorist sociology would instead investigate social processes in their very factuality, their open-endedness, complexity, and path dependency. A priorism in sociology, I would argue, is dominant in both positivism and phenomenology. The article opposes to phenomenology's transcendentaI rationalism a `transcendental empiricism' that is illustrated with Edmund Burke's English and aposteriori aesthetics of the sublime. Sociology today needs to be relevant to study of `emerging' nations like China. The article argues for an aposteriorist, empiricist sociology here, and looks at debates on property law in today's China. Here we look at rationalist and a priori notions of clear, distinct and divisible property in Continental reception of Roman law. We counterpose to this English, empiricist (a posteriori) Common Law notions of property as a bundle of rights, in which property is not clear and distinct but vague like a boundary object. We look at how this is instantiated in China. With François Jullien, we contrast a Chinese, effectively empiricist, aposteriorist notion of the universal to Western rationalist and a priori universalism. We look at the implications for international geopolitics and a possible Chinese route to democracy. With Jullien, we counterpose an aposteriorist Chinese notion of `activity' to the Western a priori notions of `action' found in Weber and Parsons. The Chinese `activity' is more processual, more relational, less goal-oriented, more path-dependent than our Western notion of `action'. The article argues that in the twenty-first century when national social control is partly displaced by global uncertainty, and when the ascendancy of the West is coming increasingly under question, that such an empiricist, aposteriorist sociology is suitable. (shrink)

For Kant, experience is epistemological, whereas ontological experience is in the first instance poetic and Romantic. In contradistinction to Kantian Erfahrung, it is most often called Erlebniß. We note further that Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. Dilthey and Husserl understand experience pertaining to knowledge through Erlebnis. In epistemological or classificatory knowledge the parts add up to the whole. Ontological knowledge instead is holistic in which the whole is present in each of the parts. In ontological (...) knowledge we can know things themselves. Ontological experience is particularly important for global knowledge. This is because knowing another culture is not reducible to a culture's qualities or predicates. Culture as a way or form of life is a thingitself. A third type of experience is informational experience. This collapses the epistemological into the ontological and is also increasingly present today. This sort of experience of non-linear information theory can account for the experience of societies, of individual humans, of digital media, of neuronal networks, of phenotypes, urban forms, of cellular organisms, or of inorganic matter. (shrink)

François Jullien wants us to see what thought and life could look like without ontology, promising intellectual riches unavailable in the heavy ontological apparatus we are deeply invested in. The strength of Jullien’s argument comes from a deep and unique alliance between philosophy and Chinese thought, a risky one – incurring predictable disgruntlement from both philosophy and sinology – but nevertheless enduring and productive. This is far from advocating one in place of another, as we are accustomed to do in (...) critical theory in relation to divinity, grand narratives, scientism, modernity, and even stable truths. It is an endeavour to think the ‘unthought of’ of ontology through what Jullien calls a vis-à-vis suspended in productive tension, a dialogue. In philosophy, the other is subsumed in a singular dialectical relationship through oppositions. What Jullien insists on is a doubleness of co-existence in Chinese thought rather than a singularity of dialectics in ontology. If ontology grounds a philosophy that makes a world in its image, and if that image is increasingly untenable as an ecology of the planet, Jullien’s call for a deeper reflexivity in ontology is of enormous significance. This special issue brings both Jullien’s argument and Chinese thought to a forum to explicate what this could mean in multiple fields from art and architecture to anthropology and critical theory. (shrink)

In this interview, Philip Mirowski, a foremost economic historian and philosopher of economic thought, discusses his research into the history of economics along with its complex relationship to the natural sciences and the recent rise of neoliberalism. The conversation starts by focusing on his early work on the birth of neoclassical economics as an imitation of modern physics via energetic metaphors. We also discuss the subsequent impact of the computer metaphor and its influence on post-Second World War economic theory. Some (...) of the most important aspects of the informational turn in economics are discussed, such as the understanding of the market processes as a form of computation and the shift from a concern with the nature of the individual agent to the institutional framework of markets. This inevitably leads us to Mirowski’s recent work, where he takes the informational turn in economics to its ultimate conclusions, arguing for an algorithmic understanding of markets. He calls this a theory of markomata, or a computational evolutionary economics. Finally, the discussion addresses the interdependencies between the general understanding of markets as superior information processors, the rise of neoliberalism and the recent financial crisis. (shrink)

. Being after time: Towards a politics of melancholy. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 305-319.

Jessica Dubow’s In Exile – working through Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig – reads Judaic thought from the Exodus as exile. With Rosenzweig, she understands this as pitting the (Judaic) singular of faith against the (Greek) universal of reason. This ‘bad universal’ was Hegel’s state, which Dubow also sees as Carl Schmitt’s state. Dubow sees this as it were universal of dominance in today’s Israeli state, against which she pits the singular of exilic thought.

This serves as an introduction to this section on Beck and as a standalone essay. In it we see that the writers in this section understand Beck's risk as modernity itself. And in this context risk's reflexive modernity is understood as ‘indeterminate modernity’. The essay thematizes a radically subjectivist reading of Beck's risk. It sees reflexivity as opposed to the objectivism and positivism of Kant's critique of pure reason, and instead in terms of the subjectivity of Kant's third aesthetic critique. (...) Thus, Beck's subjectivist risk and indeterminate modernity focuses not on Kantian and positivist first-modernity ‘cause’ but instead on second and indeterminate-modernity ‘consequence’. This entails significant levels of anxiety on the part of individuals as well as the possibility of enhanced happiness. The latter is understood in terms of, again, the subjectivist psychology of Daniel Kahneman's behaviouralist economics. This is a substantivist economics and dovetails with Weber's Methodenstreit between the substantivism of the Historical School and the formalism of neoclassical economics. The essay closes with a look at how this radically subjectivist and substantivist reflexivity is the basis for a panoply of non-normative institutions in Beck's vision of global cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

This is a commemoration of Ulrich Beck, written originally just after his passing. It understands Beck in terms of Kant’s critiques. Here if, say, Latour incorporates the first critique of instrumentalism and Habermas the second critique of morality, then Ulrich points us to the third critique – hope.

This ground-breaking book addresses transformations in the understanding of time and the generation and degeneration of value at the cutting edge of modernity and postmodernity. The book is a multi-disciplinary contribution to current work in the social sciences, in cultural theory and in more pragmatic areas such as advertising and global communication. It brings together the work of distinguished international scholars and new young thinkers. Time and Value contains an exploration of such themes as the timescapes of nature and the (...) impact of disease, ecological catastrophe, and many other issues. In theoretical terms, the collection draws in particular upon writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Paul Virilio and Martin Heidegger, whose work is particularly relevant in considering how technology has had a powerful impact upon the construal of time and the explanation of how time constructs human lives in late modernity. The compression of time and its fragmentation correspond with a collapse in and reconstruction of value systems. This deconstruction of time is juxtaposed with a range of possibilities that emerge when the specific times of the media, literature, art, virtuality, nature, performance, fashion, semiotic codings, spirituality, the self and the body are understood as creative opportunity. (shrink)

This article reflects on some themes in Harrison White’s work in the context of China, where the social and cultural construction of markets is quite literal. We explore how we get markets where previously there were no markets and draw on White’s central themes of ‘uncertainty’, ‘value’ and ‘order’. We maintain a distinction, with White and with Frank Knight, of risk, on the one hand, and uncertainty, on the other, where ‘risk’ has to do with entities that are in principle (...) insurable or calculable and ‘uncertainty’ has to do with what is not calculable/insurable. An entrepreneur’s decision to enter a market, to invest in and enter a production market, entails what White calls a ‘commitment to facilities’. This, for White and Knight, is inherently incalculable, and hence uncertain. (shrink)

This article reflects on some themes in Harrison White’s work in the context of China, where the social and cultural construction of markets is quite literal. We explore how we get markets where previously there were no markets and draw on White’s central themes of ‘uncertainty’, ‘value’ and ‘order’. We maintain a distinction, with White and with Frank Knight, of risk, on the one hand, and uncertainty, on the other, where ‘risk’ has to do with entities that are in principle (...) insurable or calculable and ‘uncertainty’ has to do with what is not calculable/insurable. An entrepreneur’s decision to enter a market, to invest in and enter a production market, entails what White calls a ‘commitment to facilities’. This, for White and Knight, is inherently incalculable, and hence uncertain. (shrink)

Over the past three years or so, Telos and New German Critique have opened a debate in which Habermas's theory of communicative rationality has been counterposed to the ‘aesthetic-sensual forms of subjectivity’ advocated by certain French theorists, who have come to be known as the ‘post-structuralists’. Among the latter, the most significant figures are Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This confrontation between theories of desire and theories of communicative rationality is perhaps only just beginning, but already (...) it has made a creative contribution to the development of social theory, and more importantly, it has helped — in conjunction with the new social movements (feminism, the peace movement, the ecology movement) — to clarify some practical issues involved in the task of building a new political culture. (shrink)

The concept of suture has long been an important and controversial concept in investigations of the relationships between narrative, diegesis, character, and spectator. The dominant understanding of suture has paid more attention to its Lacanian derivation – and to the account given by Daniel Dayan – than to the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart which first introduced suture into Film Studies. This article, however, follows the recent work of George Butte, who argues that the way Oudart understands suture is very illuminating (...) for the study of the complex forms of intersubjectivity that cinema so readily, and so richly, dramatises – famously by means of shot/reverse shot figures. It argues that certain key moments in Ridley Scott's Alien activate ideas of corporeality, desire, and intersubjectivity in ways that contribute to a wider thematic and figurative nexus at work in the film directed at the exploration of impossible intersubjectivities. The article also proposes that, via this nexus, the film offers an intriguing instantiation of Nietzsche's notion of the “human, all too human”, thereby demonstrating that there is much more in Nietzsche of relevance to Alien than the xenomorph's superhuman “will-to-power”. The android Ash's admiration for the alien's lack both of conscience and consciousness ironically indicates his own all-too-human recognition of the superfluity but inescapability of his own consciousness. The article concludes by drawing briefly on the work of Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, proposing that much of the horror of Alien lies not only in how bodies are ruptured but in the fact that some subjectivities cannot even be sutured. (shrink)

It is facile and factually incorrect to represent suicide terrorists as simply seeking mass destruction, as demented or believing that they will be rewarded by "seventy-two virgins in paradise". In my book The Myth of the Closed Mind: Understanding How and Why People are Rational I felt it was important to deal with the issue of terrorism by consulting explanatory theories of human behaviour and the substantial research on the strategic pattern of terrorist incidents over the decades, led principally by (...) Professor Robert Pape of Chicago University. -/- To defeat your enemy, you must first understand him. Strangely, we must first grant that, though morally depraved, terrorists are rational: they concoct and execute detailed plans with definite strategic goals in mind. Only once we have granted the terrorist a rational mind can we, in the end, create peace. My argument is that while religion may have a small role in terrorism, it is principally politics, or the logic of territorial control, that is the key to understanding the threat we face. -/- This extract from my book is principally about Al Qaeda, but a similar analysis applies to ISIS, the current greatest threat to our peace in the west. -/- The strategic goal of Al Qaeda was simply to repulse what they saw as foreign intervention. ISIS has the same goal, but in order to continue its growth as a state in the sense of a monopoly of coercion over a given geographical area. -/- ISIS, a rogue state that arose in ungoverned space created unintentionally by foreign intervention in Iraq, is now lashing out at foreign governments that have severely shrunk the territory ISIS occupies. Before October 2015, ISIS confined its terrorism to the goal of extending its territory in Iraq and Syria, and there were no significant ISIS-led or inspired suicide terrorist attacks outside Iraq and Syria. But now, as their territory collapses, they are attacking the countries that have strangled their control of territory in Iraq and Syria: the coalition of western governments – Britain, Belgium, Canada, France, Morocco, Turkey, Russia, the U.S.A. and others – exactly the countries that have recently seen an explosion of suicide terrorism. (shrink)

Theological materialism, it is argued, provides an important ethical orientation towards climate change. Following the tradition of practical materialism inaugurated by Karl Marx, materialism is here interpreted in a non-reductive sense that includes a stress on human praxis. Such a materialism is comprehensive in the sense that it identifies the sources of climate change as twofold: as rooted in a capitalist crisis and as rooted in a crisis in our conditions of life. Such a materialism is also theological: it is (...) ‘flesh made word’ (Nicholas Lash). One implication of this theological materialism is that creation is to be understood as good. This theme is explored by way of the ‘revolt of nature’: this trope provides a theological way of exploring nature in a changing climate. At the conclusion, critical issues raised by the title, Thinking like an animal, are addressed. (shrink)

“Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight.... [His] arguments are often lively and entertaining.”—Los Angeles Times Fully revised and with a new preface by the author, this timely update is perfect for readers of The Immortality Key. Since its initial release to wide acclaim in 2006, Not in His Image has transformed the lives of readers around the world by presenting the living presence of the Wisdom (...) Goddess as never before revealed, illustrating that the truth of an impactful Gnostic message cannot be hidden or destroyed. With clarity, author John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. Early Christians burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. Not in His Image delves deeply into ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality—the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia. In the 15th Anniversary Edition, Lash doubles down on his original argument against redemptive ideology and authoritarian deceit. He shows how the Gnostics clearly foresaw the current program of salvation by syringe, and places the Sophianic vision of life centrally in the battle to expose and oppose the evil agenda of transhumanism, making this well-timed update more relevant than ever. “Sometimes a book changes the world. Not in His Image is such a book. It is clear, stimulating, well-researched, and sure to outrage the experts.... Get it. Improve not just your own life, but civilization’s chances for survival.”—Roger Payne, author of Among Whales. (shrink)

God knows when we are feeling down, or happy, or need help apologizing, or when we are scared, but most importantly, he wants us to know that he loves us no matter how we feel.