Download or read book Observations on Modernity written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of five essays by Germanys most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmanns social theory to the question What is modern about modernity? and shows the origins and context of his theory. In the introductory essay, Modernity in Contemporary Society, Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls social differentiation, thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. European Rationality defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox. In the third essay, Contingency as Modern Societys Defining Attribute, Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a preadaptive advance through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In Describing the Future, Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with The Ecology of Ignorance, in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas for sponsors who have yet to be identified.
Download or read book True Crime written by Mark Seltzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.
Download or read book Modernity and Postmodernity written by Gerard Delanty and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-04-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and comprehensive overview of the main issues on the modernity-postmodernity controversy is the first clear-sighted book on the subject. It surveys modern social theory, from Kant to Weber with economy and masterly precision. And evaluates the work of the Frankfurt School, Arendy, Strauss, Luhmann, Habermas, Heller, Castoriadis and Touraine, before moving on to consider the approaches of the leading writers on postmodenrity: Lyotard, Vattimo, Derrida, Foucault and Jameson. The result is a new way of conceptualizing the modernity-postmodernity debate, and an exciting new approach to the roots of contemporary social theory.
Download or read book Disillusioning Modernity written by Balázs Brunczel and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Niklas Luhmann is the most innovative and comprehensive attempt to describe modern society. His views, in turn, have triggered the most intensive criticism ever in social sciences. This book presents his extraordinarily complex theory in a step-by-step fashion and in a way understandable for those who are not familiar with his thought. It examines his views on politics, which, the author argues, is the best way to demonstrate the provocative character of his theory. The book not only facilitates the understanding of Luhmann's theory but is also useful for getting an insight into the methodological problems of the social sciences and the theoretical issues of modern society. Whether we agree with Luhmann or not, his thoughts on democracy, legitimacy, human rights, and the welfare state may help us understand the society we live in. The reader may consider his disillusioning findings as challenges that can contribute to the solution of the problems our society faces.
Download or read book Art as a Social System written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.
Download or read book Theories of Distinction written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume formulate what is considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The volume starts with an examination of the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition notably the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Download or read book Genuine Pretending written by Hans-Georg Moeller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections. With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending”: the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one’s identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media’s paradoxical quest for originality.
Download or read book Towards the Third Modernity written by Alain de Vulpian and published by Triarchy Press Limited. This book was released on 2008-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling insight into the lives of ordinary people is the culmination of 60 years' research into what we believe; what we fear; how we love; what we like; who we are; how we are changing the world - and what we are going to do next. At last, Towards The Third Modernity sets out the results of in-depth field research that spans the last 60 years and looks forward to changes that are still on the horizon. Drawing on a mass of interviews, field research, life histories, opinion polls, surveys and social observation conducted across Western Europe and North America since the early 1950s, the author plots the passage of what he calls the First and Second Modernities.
Download or read book The Topography of Modernity written by Elliott Schreiber and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Philipp Moritz (d. 1793) was one of the most innovative writers of the late Enlightenment in Germany. A novelist, travel writer, editor, and teacher he is probably best known today for his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) and for his treatises on aesthetics, foremost among them Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful) (1788). In this treatise, Moritz develops the concept of aesthetic autonomy, which became widely known after Goethe included a lengthy excerpt of it in his own Italian Journey (1816–17). It was one of the foundational texts of Weimar classicism, and it became pivotal for the development of early Romanticism. In The Topography of Modernity, Elliott Schreiber gives Moritz the credit he deserves as an important thinker beyond his contributions to aesthetic theory. Indeed, he sees Moritz as an incisive early observer and theorist of modernity. Considering a wide range of Moritz’s work including his novels, his writings on mythology, prosody, and pedagogy, and his political philosophy and psychology, Schreiber shows how Moritz’s thinking developed in response to the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment and paved the way for later social theorists to conceive of modern society as differentiated into multiple, competing value spheres.
Download or read book Social Acceleration written by Hartmut Rosa and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.
Download or read book The German Picaro and Modernity written by Bernhard Malkmus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German Pícaro and Modernity reads the re-emergence of the picaresque narrative in twentieth-century German-language writing as an expression of modernity and its social imaginaries. Malkmus argues that the picaresque, whose origins date back to the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque Age, re-emerged as a reflection both of Germany's explosive modernizing processes between 1880 and 1930 and of the most barbarous implosion of modern civilization under National Socialism. Another reason for the fertility of this literary form at that particular cultural moment is rooted in the complexities of German-Jewish relations and the history of Jewish assimilation in central Europe. A considerable number of authors who used the picaresque form in the twentieth century are from a Jewish background, and Malkmus demonstrates how the picaresque narrative template also offers a medium for German-Jewish self-reflection. In highlighting these connections, he contributes not only to scholarship in European literature, but also but also to our understanding of major social, economic and political issues at stake in modernity
Download or read book The Great Han written by Kevin Carrico and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Han is an ethnographic study of the Han Clothing Movement, a neotraditionalist and racial nationalist movement that has emerged in China since 2001. Participants come together both online and in person in cities across China to revitalize their utopian vision of the authentic “Great Han” and corresponding “real China” through pseudotraditional ethnic dress, reinvented Confucian ritual, and anti-foreign sentiment. Analyzing the movement’s ideas and practices, this book argues that the vision of a pure, perfectly ordered, ethnically homogeneous, and secure society is in fact a fantasy constructed in response to the challenging realities of the present. Yet this national imaginary is reproduced precisely through its own perpetual elusiveness. The Great Han is a pioneering analysis of Han identity, nationalism, and social movements in a rapidly changing China.
Download or read book Risk Environment and Modernity written by Scott Lash and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1996-01-31 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies′.
Download or read book Sociological Reasoning written by Rob Stones and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While sociological modernists were outrageously presumptious in their claims for sociological knowledge, postmodernists have gone to another extreme in claiming that it has no more truth status than fiction. Critical of both positions, Sociological Reasoning develops an original typology of approaches to social scientific theory and research which is distinguished by its openness and reflexive awareness of rhetorical and methodological aspects of knowledge claims. Laced with graphic illustrative examples, this is a strikingly well-written text that will appeal to students at undergraduate level and beyond.
Download or read book The Theological Origins of Modernity written by Michael Allen Gillespie and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life- and that they did so not out of hostility but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs. He goes on to explore the ideas of such figures as William of Ockham, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, showing that modernity is best understood as the result of a series of attempts to formulate a new and coherent metaphysics or theology.
Download or read book Kierkegaard Mimesis and Modernity written by Wojciech Kaftanski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age. Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Liquid Modernity written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.
