Online research in philosophy

Guattari looked for crossovers between film and television in a posthumously published ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’. His critical comments on television and the mixed reception of television within the Deleuzo-Guattarian literature provide the occasion for an investigation of what Guattari thought television could do for his project. The auteur model best suits his needs in this regard, with the proviso that it is animated by a modernist aesthetic oriented towards the conjuring of a people to come who would (...) join the Kafka assemblage as part of their viewing experience. (shrink)

This is the first detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari--"Mr. Anti" as the French press labelled him--the friend of and collaborator with ...

In McLuhan and Baudrillard , Gary Genosko traces McLuhan's influence on the influential French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Gary Genosko argues that McLuhan's ideas have been far more influential than hitherto imagined in the development of postmodern theory. Tracing parallels between the so-called "McLuhan Cult" of the 1960's and the "Baudrillard Scene" of the 1980's, he explores how McLuhan's ideas persist and are distorted through Baudrillard's work, via concepts such as semiurgy, participation, reversibility, the primitive/tribal, and implosion. He argues that (...) it is through the filter of Baudrillard's writings that McLuhan has had the greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice. (shrink)

What is the value of interdisciplinary theory? Are there any boundaries left which social theory must recognize? This book argues that the vital questions in theory are being posed and followed at the interdisciplinary level. Our awareness of this is curtailed by the institutional organization of social theory which still tends to assume a canon and clear boundaries. According to Gary Genosko, postmodernism has provided the main challenge to institutional myopia. Yet postmodernism is too often treated as an aberration or (...) a blind alley. The challenge for social theorists today is to develop and practice `undisciplined theories' which constantly question the limits of the canon and expose the porous character of boundaries. The book contains rigorous and original analyses of the writings of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, McLuhan, Freud and St Augustine. The author uses these materials to point the way to credible forms of undisciplined theory. Three tasks emerge as urgent issues for social theory: the need to think and feel ambivalence; to track the circulation of anomalies in theoretical texts; and to learn from the fascination with interpretative boundlessness. Undisciplined Theory will be of interest to academics of social and cultural theory. (shrink)