Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or to carry on our ability to affect the world? Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.

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 Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Antonio Negri, and one of the 20th Century's last great activist-intellectuals. Guattari is widely known for his celebrated writings with Deleuze, but these writings do not represent the true breadth and impact of his thinking, writing and activism. Guattari's major work as a clinical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis was closely linked to his participation in struggles against European right-wing politics. Felix Guattari introduces the reader to the diversity and sheer range of Guattari's interests, from anti-psychiatry, to Japanese culture, political activism and his theorizing of subjectification.Highlighting why Guattari's work is of increasing relevance to contemporary political, psychoanalytical and philosophical thought, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction presents the reader with an adventurous and provocative introduction to this radical thinker.

The ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and activist analyst Felix Guattari are transforming disciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences.
These three volumes gather together classic essays that demonstrate the richness of these fascinating and important thinkers influence.
The set incorporates:
* key essays by an international selection of theorists and practitioners
* the development of implications for the built environment
* the first ever collection of critical material on Guattari
* long out-of-print and hard to find materials

Using independent critical and cultural theory journals that cross the Canada/US border as key examples, this book shows how to interpret the original practices of periodicals by tracing editorial diasporas and transitions to electronic publishing. Back Issues explains the role of independent theory journals in the institutional formation of critical theory and cultural studies in Canada and the US by focusing on two seminal publications, Paul Piccone's Telos and Arthur Kroker's Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Editorial transits across the international border figure largely, as do founding conferences, interpersonal flare-ups, and the conviviality of academic communities and pre-gentrified urban bohemias. Both commensurable and incommensurable relationships between journal projects are analysed, and a hitherto unwritten history of critical and cultural theory in Canada is broached.

"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.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s, has not been forgotten. Almost two decades after his death, a McLuhan renaissance is underway, fuelled by the very developments in new media technologies he long ago predicted. His famous buzzphrases, "the medium is the message" and "the global village", are once again in circulation. In this text Gary Genosko traces McLuhans influence on a guru of cultural theory - the French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Gary Genosko argues that McLuhans ideas have been far more influential than imagined in the development of postmodern theory. Tracing parallels between the so-called McLuhan Cult of the 1960s and the Baudrillard Scene of the 1980s, 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 Baudrillad's influence that McLuhanism has had its greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s, has not been forgotten. Almost two decades after his death, a McLuhan renaissance is underway, fuelled by the very developments in new media technologies he long ago predicted. His famous buzzphrases, the medium is the message and the global village, are once again in circulation.
In McLuhan and Baudrillard, Gary Genosko traces McLuhans influence on a guru of cultural theory - the French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard.
Gary Genosko argues that McLuhans 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 1960s and the Baudrillard Scene of the 1980s, he explores how McLuhans ideas persist and are distorted through Baudrillards work, via concepts such as semiurgy, participation, reversibility, the primitive/tribal, and implosion. He argues that it is through Baudrillad's influence that McLuhanism has had its greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice.

This book documents Baudrillard's encounters with semiology and structuralism, detailing his efforts to destroy structural analyses from the inside by setting signification ablaze with his concept of symbolic exchange. The text also reveals Baudrillard's difficulties in attempting to go beyond signification. It situates Baudrillard's work in the broad spectrum of European and American semiotic traditions. The book also traces the development of his key concept of symbolic exchange over 30 years of theorizing. It discusses Baudrillard's engagements with and debts to French theatre and literature, with reference to Antoin Artaud, Alfred Jarry and Victor Segalen. Finally, it considers Baudrillard's relation to the thought of Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, de Certeau and Lyotard.

This book documents Baudrillard's encounters with semiology and structuralism, detailing his efforts to destroy structural analyses from the inside by setting signification ablaze with his concept of symbolic exchange. The text also reveals Baudrillard's difficulties in attempting to go beyond signification. It situates Baudrillard's work in the broad spectrum of European and American semiotic traditions. The book also traces the development of his key concept of symbolic exchange over 30 years of theorizing. It discusses Baudrillard's engagements with and debts to French theatre and literature, with reference to Antoin Artaud, Alfred Jarry and Victor Segalen. Finally, it considers Baudrillard's relation to the thought of Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, de Certeau and Lyotard.

The Reinvention of Social Practices shows the relevance of Felix Guattari's thought for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural encounters, ranging across an alternative 'skateboard' school, informatic subjugations, urban ecological dilemmas, drug subcultures, and countercultures. Gary Genosko, the leading English interpreter of Guattari, expands upon Guattari's conception of schizoanalysis as a transformative process of critical self-modelling that leads to the creation of new maps of existence, highlighting an interpretive dream pragmatics, a peripatetic psychiatric practice, a rethinking of epilepsy, and a post-media vision of digital interfaces beyond the keyboard. The folds of Guattari's collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri are explored, and his philosophical friendship with Franco Bifo Berardi is brought into focus.

This book offers a detailed look at Guattari's working methods in transdisciplinary experimentation from the time of his youth to his final years.His youthful adventures in the post-war Youth Hostels movement, decisive contact with institutional pedgagogy and the mentor figures of Fernand Oury and his brother Jean, give rise to an extraordinary penchant for organizational innovation in his life at Clinique de La Borde in Cour-Cheverny, France, and collective forms of expression manifested in publishing ventures and diverse collaborative research formations.Guattari's highly original and hitherto neglected theories of a-signifyng semiotics and minor cinema are explored in depth with reference to the political goals of the critique of infoculture and the molecular revolutionary tendencies that are released in the search for a people to come.Guttari's engagement with eco-politics and art practices displays his originality as a political thinker and is firmly grounded on his exporation of how subjectivity is produced inlate capitalism.Guattari's ground-breaking conception of transversal politics is fully explored in relation to Michel Foucault's sense of the concept and its role in global political theory.

"When Technocultures Collide" provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. The adventures and exploits of computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, "CrackBerry" users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, chess geeks, and a range of losers and tinkerers feature prominently in this volume. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users.

The author provides critical accounts of understudied technological detours, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big-toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. The goal of this work is to look beyond means of resistance to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of underground groups, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of the BlackBerry and Julian Assange's WikiLeaks website.

Covering major developments from post-war cybernetics and telegraphy to the Internet and our networked society, Remodelling Communication explores the critical literature from across disciplines and eras on the models used for studying communications and culture.

Proceeding model-by-model, Genosko provides detailed explanations of mathematical, semiotic, and reception theory's encoding/decoding models, as well as Baudrillard's critique of models and general models that bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Providing a dynamic, forward-looking reorientation towards a new universe of reference, Remodelling Communication makes a significant, productive contribution to communication theory.

Covering major developments from post-war cybernetics and telegraphy to the Internet and our networked society, Remodelling Communication explores the critical literature from across disciplines and eras on the models used for studying communications and culture. Proceeding model-by-model, Genosko provides detailed explanations of mathematical, semiotic, and reception theory's encoding/decoding models, as well as Baudrillard's critique of models and general models that bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Providing a dynamic, forward-looking reorientation towards a new universe of reference, Remodelling Communication makes a significant, productive contribution to communication theory.

This is a detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari, "Mr Anti" as the French press labelled him, the friend of and collaborator with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Antonio Negri, and one of the 20th century's last great activist-intellectuals. Guattari is widely known for his celebrated writings with Deleuze, but these writings do not represent the true breadth and impact of his thinking, writing and activism. Guattari's major work as a clinical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis was closely linked to his participation in struggles against European right-wing politics. This book introduces the reader to the diversity and sheer range of Guattari's interests, from anti-psychiatry, to Japanese culture, political activism and his theorizing of subjectification.

Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or to carry on our ability to affect the world? Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.

Jean Baudrillard is generally recognized as one of the most important and provocative contemporary social theorists. But in the English speaking world, his reputation is largely based on books published after the 1960s, as he moved towards becoming the premier commentator on postmodernism.

This wide ranging and expertly edited book examines the work of the young Baudrillard, it deepens our understanding of his seminal work on consumer culture by presenting his early essays on McLuhan, Lefebvre and Marcuse. The influence of German traditions of thought are clearly revealed, and Baudrillard's neglected and out of print writing on aesthetics is rediscovered and reprinted. Extracts from his political diaries and commentaries on European terrorism and the rise of the new Right, provide crucial insights into his later claims regarding the implosion of the masses and the rise of gesturial politics.

Baudrillard emerges as a more nuanced and penetrating figure. His aesthetic and political interests are shown to be more deep-rooted and reflexive. In general, the book supplies the missing link for English speaking readers interested in understanding this prismatic and essential thinker.

The Reinvention of Social Practices shows the relevance of Felix Guattari's thought for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural encounters, ranging across an alternative 'skateboard' school, informatic subjugations, urban ecological dilemmas, drug subcultures, and countercultures. Gary Genosko, the leading English interpreter of Guattari, expands upon Guattari's conception of schizoanalysis as a transformative process of critical self-modelling that leads to the creation of new maps of existence, highlighting an interpretive dream pragmatics, a peripatetic psychiatric practice, a rethinking of epilepsy, and a post-media vision of digital interfaces beyond the keyboard. The folds of Guattari's collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri are explored, and his philosophical friendship with Franco Bifo Berardi is brought into focus.

"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.

What is the value of interdisciplinary theory? Are there any boundaries left which social theory must recognize? This book shows 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. Gary Genosko proposes that 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.