We live in an age when consumption and consuming have come to define us. Consumption, now a global phenomenon, is so dominant it allows little room for alternatives. At the same time, information and digitization have become all-pervasive in our media culture . As ever greater aspects of the world have come to be seen as 'data', information has increasingly become the very currency of consumption.Consumption in an Age of Information maps this new terrain. Bringing together some of the world's leading theorists and critics, the essays range across high theory and popular culture - from informational flows to science fiction simulations, from pop-cultural consumption to capitalism as religion, from the consumption of time to the role of 'speed' in contemporary culture.

What is theory doing in America? Does high French theory continue to be a significant force in American intellectual life? This volume of new work presents both discussions of these questions and demonstrations of what French theory looks like today, thirty years after its first appearance.

Author Biography:
Sylvere Lottringer is Professor of French Literature and Philosophy at Columbia University and Visiting Professor at Art Center, College of Design, Pasadena, California. Sande Cohen is Professor in the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts

In History Out of Joint, Sande Cohen considers the ways in which historical narratives summon up a past and lay down a future in the ever-multiplying intellectual debates of contemporary public culture. As competing factions advance contradictory principles to validate or discredit their preferred accounts of the past and the present, Cohen argues that the fundamental question of how these principles themselves should be addressed - of what truly constitutes the use or abuse of history - has been pushed aside. Taking Nietzsche's idea of a simultaneous production and anti-production of culture as his starting point, Cohen proposes that the real abuse lies in the attempt to establish one version of history by effacing every other and, crucially, that this now prevalent idea of historiography reduced to a political resource has itself become a normal starting point of such abuse. examining popular newspaper accounts of events - misrepresentation from the bottom up - in geopolitics and art, different modern views of the historian's role as a public authority, and the function of anecdote and its relationship to historical writing. He then turns to the works of several major figures in contemporary critical theory, including Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari. Reading them in the perspective of theory of history and narration, Cohen makes a critique of Derrida and then turns to Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of an event. Against the belief that their ideas led primarily to escapism, blindness, or endless deferral, Cohen demonstrates how their concepts of an affirmative yet critical event can be applied specifically to counter contemporary abuse of history and, in doing so, to resist social passivity, the nihilism and eschatological catastrophe of which they describe.

Today, we live in an age where consumption and consuming have become dominant practices - so dominant they allow little room for alternatives. Consumption has become a global phenomenon. This expansion of consumption has occurred at the same time as notions of information and digitization have become all-pervasive in our media culture . As ever greater aspects of the world have come to be seen as data, information has increasingly become the very currency of consumption.Consumption in an Age of Information analyses this new relationship between information and consumption. Leading theorists and critics map this new terrain, ranging across high theory and popular culture - from E-Bay auctions to smart homes, from the everyday consumption of MP3 files and DVDs to the rituals of media violence, from internet-surfing to the role of speed in contemporary culture.