Description
Book SynopsisThis book is Lash''s most comprehensive statement in social and cultural theory. It is a book addressed to sociologists and philosophers, to students of urban life, modern languages, cultural studies and the visual arts.
Alongside the Enlightenment has emerged another modernity. This second modernity has - in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of progress, order, homogeneity and cognition - initiated a different rationality of uncertainty, transience, experiment, and the unknowable. This second, this other modernity, is present in notions of ''difference'' and ''reflexivity'' so central to the contemporary world-view. The logic, however, of such notions can, itself, lead to the same unhappy abstraction of the first modernity. What is forgotten, Scott Lash argues, is the dimension of the ground. This book consists of explorations into this ground: as place, community, belonging, sociality, tradition, life-world; as symbol, sensation, in the tactile character of the sign. Th
Trade Review
"Serious, intelligent and innovative, this book compels us to rethink our modern/ postmodern certainties." Mark Poster, Laguna Beach, California
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.
1. Introduction.
Part I: Space:.
2. The First Modernity: Humans and Machines.
Garden City and Functionalism.
Structuralism.
Formalism.
Modernist Humanism?.
Conclusions.
3. Simulated Humanism: Postmodern Architecture.
Avant-gardes.
History.
Humanism.
Complexity.
Vernacular.
Conclujsions.
4. Ground the City.
Fields of Mapping: Grids and Labyrinths.
Productions of Space: Classical and Gothic.
The Other Modernity: Lived Space in Japan.
Urban Space and Allegory.
Part II: Society.
5. From System to Symbol: Durkheim and French Sociology.
Space and Society.
System.
Symbol: Durkheim and Mauss.
6. Symbol and Allegory: Simmel and German Sociology.
Values and Facts.
From Symbol to Allegory.
Conclusion.
Part III: Experience.
7. The Natural Attitude and the Reflexive Attitude.
Alfred Schutz: from Meaning to Understanding Signification and Existence.
8. Difference and Infinity: Derrida.
Kant, Husserl, Derrida.
Escape from Totality.
Time and Self-presence.
Three Modes of Signification.
Part IV: Judgement.
9. Reflexive Judgement and Aesthetic Subjectivity.
Finality of the Object, Singularity of the Subject.
Permanence and Finitude: Gadamer.
10. Discourse, Figure....Sensation.
The Body With Organs.
Greeks, Jews, Pagans.
Conclusions.
Part V: Objects.
11. Objects that Judge: Latour's Parliament of Things.
Towards a Non-Modern Constitution.
Morphisms Weavers and Object Trackers.
Ç'accuse.
Networks: Spiralling Time and Space.
12. Bad Objects: Virilio.
From Cité to War Machine.
Death: Bads, Contingency, Theodicy.
From War to Cinema.
From the Mental and the Instrumental: The End of the Gaze.
Polar Inertia: The Last Vehicle.
Time of Exposure.
13. The Symbolic in Fragments: Walter Benjamin's Talking Things.
Allegory: The Aesthetics of Destruction.
Protestant Ethic, Baroque Melancholy.
14. Conclusion.
Notes.
Index.
