Tony D. Sampson: Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012)

“In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates.

Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview.

According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2012
ISBN 0816670056, 9780816670055
235 pages

Review: Jussi Parikka (Theory, Culture & Society)
Book video (University of Amsterdam students)

Author’s research blog
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-9-29)

Félix Guattari, Suely Rolnik: Molecular Revolution in Brazil (1986–) [BR-PT, ES, EN]

“Following Brazil’s first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil’s future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.

Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari’s work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula’s Brazil.”

Originally published as Micropolítica: Cartografias do desejo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1986.

English edition
Translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes
Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350512, 9781584350514
495 pages

Review: Aliocha wald Lasowski (Chimères, 2007, FR).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (ES, Madrid)
Publisher (ES, Buenos Aires)

Micropolítica. Cartografias do desejo (BR-Portuguese, 4th ed., 1984/1996, added on 2017-2-22)
Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo (Spanish, trans. Florencia Gómez, Madrid ed., 2006, added on 2013-9-26)
Molecular Revolution in Brazil (English, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes, 2008, updated on 2017-6-26)
Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo (Spanish, trans. Florencia Gómez, Buenos Aires ed., 2nd ed., 2006/2013, added on 2020-11-14)

Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006)

Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan’s work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan’s seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

Translated by Bruce Fink
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2006
ISBN 0393329259, 9780393329254
Length 878 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

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