Description

Contemporary culture, today′s capitalism - our global information society - is ever expanding, is ever more extensive. And yet we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon which can only be characterized as intensive.

This book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture. While extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of fixed equivalence; intensive culture is a culture of difference, of in-equivalence - the singular. Intensities generate what we encounter. They are virtuals or possibilities, always in process and always in movement.

We thus live in a culture that is both extensive and intensive. Indeed the more globally stretched and extensive social relations become the more they simultaneously seem to take on this intensity. Ours is a relational world where each intensity -- whether human, technological or biological -- provides a distinct, specific window onto the whole.

Lash carefully defines and distinguishes the intensive from the extensive tracking this change through key areas of social life including:

Sociology
Religion
Philosophy
Language
Politics
Communication

In so doing he redefines the work of Leibniz, Benjamin, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx and introduces the reader to the ontological structures of our contemporary social relations.

Diverse, engaging and rich in detail the resulting book will be of interest to all those studying social and cultural theory, sociology, media and communication and cultural studies.