The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indifferent to the difference between the "other"'s life and other lives. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism argues that the Nietzschean tendencies that provide the philosophical boundaries of post-humanism do not undo humanism but reform it, constructing a parallel discourse that saves humanism from itself. Grounded in materialist analysis of social life, Human, All Too (Post)Human argues that humanism and post-humanism are cultural discourses that normalize different stages of capitalism-analog and digital capitalism. They are different orders of property relations. The question, the writers argue, is not humanism or post-humanism, namely cultural representations, but the material relations of production that are centered on wage labor. Language, free will, or human rights are not the issues since "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." The question that shapes all questions, in Human, All Too (Post)Human is freedom from (wage) labor.

The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century- developments which make up the concept of the "digital"-has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but to actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social inequality we are witness to its global expansion. Recent cultural theory tends to focus on the intricate surface effects of the emerging digital realities, proposing that technological advances effect greater cultural freedom for all, ignoring the underpinning social context. But beneath the surfaces of digital culture are complex social and historical relations that can be understood only from the perspective of a class analysis which explains why the new realities of the "digital condition" are conditioned by the actualities of global class inequalities. It is no longer the case that "technology" can take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times. In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist-which has its genealogy in such concepts as the "body without organs," "spectrality," and "differance"-has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a digital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in shaping the contemporary.

The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century— developments which make up the concept of the “digital”—has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but to actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social inequality we are witness to its global expansion. Recent cultural theory tends to focus on the intricate surface effects of the emerging digital realities, proposing that technological advances effect greater cultural freedom for all, ignoring the underpinning social context. But beneath the surfaces of digital culture are complex social and historical relations that can be understood only from the perspective of a class analysis which explains why the new realities of the “digital condition" are conditioned by the actualities of global class inequalities. It is no longer the case that "technology" can take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times. In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist—which has its genealogy in such concepts as the “body without organs,” “spectrality,” and “différance”—has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a digital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in shaping the contemporary.

Nur durch den Gebrauch unserer Muskeln sind wir in der Lage, auf unsere Umwelt einzuwirken, d.h. Krafte auszuuben und Gegenstande - und auch uns - zu bewegen. Muskeln sind biologische Maschinen, die chemische Energie, die letztlich aus der Reaktion von Nahrung mit Sauerstoff herruhrt, in Kraft und mechanische Arbeit umsetzen. Ziel dieses Buches ist es, zu erklaren, was uber die Art und Weise, wie diese Maschine arbeitet, bekannt ist. Es ist sinnlos, ein solches Problem unter einem zu engen Blickwinkel zu sehen; es be steht vielmehr die Notwendigkeit, Ideen und experimentelle Tech niken aus den Gebieten Mechanik, Biochemie, Hikroskopie, Molekular biologie, Elektronik und Thermodynamik einzufuhren, um herauszu finden, welche Vorgange in einem Muskel ablaufen, wie ein Muskel funktioniert. Es wird vorausgesetzt, dass der Leser bereits uber einiges Hintergrundwissen verfugt und, was noch wichtiger ist, echtes Interesse an der Thematik hat. Selbst Einzeller, wie z.B. eine Amobe, konnen sich bewegen, obwohl unter dem Mikroskop an ihnen keine spezialisierten Muskeln zu er kennen sind. Bei den meisten mehrzelligen Organismen jedoch sind einige Zellen auf diese spezielle Form der Energieumwandlung spezialisiert. Bei Vielzellern macht das Muskelgewebe einen Gross teil des Korpers aus, beim Menschen etwa 40 %. Das 'Fleisch' des Korpers ist fast reine Muskulatur, ebenso das Herz, der Darmtrakt und einige andere innere Organe. Der Uterus und die Harnblase z.B."